Cagle World

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Oil money, oil money.

When you have as much of it as Saudi Arabia has, it can buy a lot of things – including a sacred American sports institution like the PGA.

As all of us hackers know, the PGA Tour shocked the golf world this week by announcing it will merge with the LIV Tour, the upstart Saudi-backed professional golf tour that the PGA has been in a bitter legal fight with since last year.

The details of the nearly $3 billion deal are still unknown.

So is the impact it will have on the wallets of pro golfers and how much control it will give Saudi Arabia over the way professional golf is organized here and around the world.

The threat posed by the birth of the LIV Tour caused a lot of trouble for the PGA Tour.

By spending huge sums to lure stars like Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson into playing in its tournaments, LIV threatened the PGA’s virtual monopoly over the pro golf industry.

The lure of LIV’s money also created ill-feeling between golfers like Koepka, who took it, and stars like Rory McIlroy, who stayed with the PGA on principle and turned it down.

Meanwhile, the PGA management did everything wrong. It shamed the big names who left, held weeks of secret meetings with the Saudis and then sprang the LIV merger on the players without notice.

The PGA’s argument that golfers should not take the Saudi Kingdom’s money because of moral principles turned out to be hypocritical hogwash.

Saudi Arabia is what it is – a feudal, authoritarian country that behaves like one.

But it’s decades too late to ask anyone to take the moral high ground on Saudi Arabia, which does about $30 billion in trade with us each year. Every time you put gas in your car, you’re essentially doing business with them.

Now that the PGA has done a 180, however, McIlroy and other loyal players look like suckers and its execs have been exposed as hypocrites for trash-talking the players who took Saudi money.

At this point the PGA-LIV merger is confusing to everyone – the media, players and golf fans like me.

All I know for sure is that I couldn’t watch LIV tournaments on TV. I tried – and lasted two minutes.

I and millions of other viewers want to see the best players in the world playing the best golf in the world so we can sit at home and watch it.

We want to be following the Koepkas, Spieths and McIlroys, not the nobodies and never-winners.

The PGA tells us the merger with the Saudis and their oil money will be good for the game of golf in the long run.

Realistically, it’s mostly going to improve the bottom line of the PGA and fatten the pocketbooks of the top players.

It also might improve the way the PGA operates. Until now it has been in total control of pro golf and the golfers, who, for instance, had to play in a certain number of tournaments a year and were not allowed to be paid to enter one.

Now it looks like the players will get more control over their lives. If that turns out to be the case, the PGA-LIV marriage will be a great deal for the players.

The real problem with the merger right now, I think, is the bad optics.

It looks like the Saudis are buying up professional golf – one of America’s signature sports and our most popular global exports.

The Saudis may live in what looks like a gigantic sand trap, but they’re serious about diversifying their economy by investing heavily in the sports and entertainment industries.

They’ve got $600-plus billion sitting in their treasury, so they’re not going to run out of cash anytime soon.

But if they do, all they have to do is what they did the other day – yell “Fore!” and jack up the price of oil.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Context. Perspective. Background.

It’s not news to anyone that the major media consistently fail to provide any of those things when covering the burning political issues of the moment.

Take, for example, the compromise the House of Representatives and the White House just made to settle the federal budget and debt-ceiling crisis.

We know from the media that it will lift the debt ceiling for two years, make some minor spending cuts and avert a financial apocalypse that supposedly would have destroyed the U.S. dollar, crippled our economy and caused the Earth to fall into the Sun.

But what we don’t know from the media, per usual, is the cause of these recurring budget fights and national debt crises in Washington.

Where do they come from? Why does the richest country in history keep having these last-minute money emergencies?

Well, the news media are too busy taking sides to get around to explaining it.

But if you look at the history of federal budget deficits, you’ll see that something important happened in 1974 – they started spiking.

1974 was the year Richard Nixon was being brought down by the Watergate scandal.

Until then, presidents had the ability to hold down the federal budget by impounding or refusing to ever spend money that Congress had allocated.

Lots of presidents before Nixon used the impoundment weapon, but it was almost always for small-change items and without huge political fights.

But Nixon, who had denounced the Democrat-run “credit-card Congress” for spending too much and causing budget deficits and inflation, impounded tens of billions of dollars for programs he didn’t like.

Telling Congress to not spend more than $250 billion a year, he threatened to veto any appropriations bills that went over that limit. He also started a Constitutional crisis by telling Congress that the Constitution said the president had the ultimate say on whether to spend money.

Congress was not pleased by Nixon’s executive power plays.

To regain almost total power over the federal purse, and to put Tricky Dick in his place, Democrats came up with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

Sold as a reform in the budgeting process, the act ended presidential impoundments and even dictated that the president can be charged with contempt of Congress if he doesn’t spend all of the funding that is allocated.

The act, a complex change in congressional sausage-making, had serious, long-term unintended consequences.

Nixon, badly weakened by Watergate, had to sign it, which allowed Democrats in Congress to go on a drunken spending spree that lasted for decades.

Just one year later, under President Ford, the federal deficit jumped from $7 billion in 1974 to $54 billion.

It ranged from about $30 billion to $80 billion through the Carter era and hit $120 billion in 1982, my father’s first budget year. It hovered around $200 billion for the rest of the 1980s.

Then, in the 1990s, the annual budget deficit soared into the $300 billion range until 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001, when Bill Clinton, thanks to pressure from the Republican House led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, miraculously racked up Washington’s only surpluses in the last half century.

For the last 23 years, the red ink has steadily gotten worse.

Under the high-spending Bush II, Obama, Trump and Biden regimes, and spiked by crises like 9/11, the Great Recession and the covid pandemic, the annual deficit has climbed to above $1 trillion.

It’s turned out that the 1974 impoundment control act was a disaster.

It put too much trust in 535 untrustworthy politicians to do the right thing and it put too much faith in the ability of voters to keep them from spending like drunken congressmen.

Getting rid of impoundments gave Congress the extra power it didn’t deserve to drive our national debt to $32 trillion.

And based on what’s happened this week, it’s only going higher. That’s this week’s history lesson.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

What are you doing to celebrate Memorial Day?

How will you honor the soldiers, sailors and airmen who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep America safe, free and great for more than 240 years?

My son Cameron, as usual, will take his daughters to a military cemetery and remind them who those fallen soldiers were and why America was worth fighting and dying for.

Cameron’s kids – my grandkids – will be taught what I taught him and my daughter Ashley and what my father drilled into me.

I remember how I first learned about the greatness of America and its military.

Riding out to the Reagan ranch, sitting in the front seat of my father’s car, he would regale me with stories about great Americans and sing all the songs of the U.S. military – the Army, Navy, Marines, even the Coast Guard.

I was lucky.

I was brought up by my parents to love America, the Founding Fathers and our sacred political foundations – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the ideals of freedom and equality under law.

Kids today are being brought up to hate America and everything about its past and present.

For one big example, they’re being taught in schools from an early age that this is a country built for and by slave owners and that it is still racist in its bones, its justice system and its government policies.

We all know who’s preaching this untruthful, harmful and dangerous lesson plan – Democrats and the liberal media.

The race card is the only card they know how to deal in politics and they’ve been playing it in elections for decades.

They played it against my father and every Republican or conservative presidential candidate or Supreme Court nominee since then.

Just this week, they immediately threw down the race card when Sen. Tim Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis announced they were running for president in the Republican primary.

Scott got the Clarence Thomas treatment.

Like the Supreme Court justice, Scott grew up dirt poor and made a huge success for himself.

Yet he was slimed by other Black people in Congress and the liberal media as being an Uncle Tom who “doesn’t know what it means to be Black.”

Hello? Doesn’t this sort of meet the definition of racism?

As for Gov. DeSantis, his candidacy was greeted with a warning from the national NAACP that because of his state’s “hate-inspired” leadership – i.e., DeSantis – Florida was not safe for blacks to travel to or live in.

The NAACP – once vitally important to bringing equality to black Americans but now embarrassingly irrelevant – was just trying to get some media attention.

But their hypocritical card trick backfired when it was pointed out that millions of Black people are happily living and running businesses in Florida – and that the chairman of the NAACP’s board lives in Tampa.

Today, I’m very proud to be an American.

Do I have problems with some bad things that have been done by our governments in the past – and especially the current one? Of course.

America is not perfect, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love it and don’t try to do everything I can to make it better.

As I said, I was lucky.

My dad didn’t wait for the schools to teach me stories about the greatness of America or the military — he did it.

Too often we think someone else is going to step up and do the teaching we need.

But if we want our kids to learn to love America and to learn why they should honor those men and women who died to make and keep it great, we’ve got to instill those values in them ourselves.

Memorial Day is a good day to remember to start doing that – and then practice it the rest of the year.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

What was the biggest threat to America in the last seven years?

If you have swallowed the party line of the Democrats, it was the storming of the Capitol by dangerous Trump “insurrectionists” on Jan. 6, 2021.

For more than two years, Democrats and their parrots in the liberal media touted 1/6 as the worst thing that has happened to the United States since 9/11.

President Biden went even farther, repeatedly claiming that 1/6 was the “greatest threat” to American democracy since the Civil War.

But sorry. I don’t buy Biden’s BS for a nanosecond.

Jan. 6, 2021 was definitely not a good day for America.

There were violent skirmishes with police outside the Capitol and a lot of window breaking and trespassing inside. Some police were hurt and their attackers have been charged accordingly.

But the unarmed mob — mostly middle-aged men and women in their finest MAGA gear, a few dozen rightwing nutjobs and a sprinkling of undercover government informants – killed no one and was hardly an existential threat to America.

Jan. 6 was a big deal, but it will never happen again. It was a one-off, a one-day national embarrassment that played out in front of the whole world. It’s over. Done.

But what is not over and done is actually the greatest threat to America since 2015 – the weaponization of the FBI and the CIA by Democrats to help the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and hurt Donald Trump.

The details of that weaponization were reported this week in the long-awaited Durham Report.

In its 305 pages, special counsel John Durham confirms what we have known all along – that the FBI’s upper management was a corrupt gang of Obama/Hillary partisans who abused their powers to harm Trump politically.

They broke the law, lied to federal judges, hid information and did whatever it took to ensure that the FBI helped Hillary and hurt Trump before and after he was elected president.

The FBI bosses hated President Trump so much that they were willing to continue pushing an investigation into his supposed collusion with Russia for four years.

They kept the Russian collusion hoax alive – with the enthusiastic help of the dishonest or dumb Trump-deranged liberal media – even though they knew that the “Steele Dossier” was a pack of lies made up by the Clinton campaign.

Hillary knew what the FBI was doing, of course, but so did President Obama.

What the FBI did on the inside of government was far more harmful to the country than anything the “insurrectionist” Republicans did from the outside on 1/6.

Not only that, to this day the FBI is still a threat to the country because of its obvious partisanship.

It’s hiding information, ignoring or slow-walking its investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop – which it’s had since 2019 – and the Joe Biden Family pay-for-play racket.

It’s also doing other un-American stuff for purely political reasons – infiltrating conservative Catholic churches that hold Latin Masses and treating some conservative parents as terrorists after they demanded information about what public schools were teaching their kids.

The Durham Report is four years too late to do the country any good. You can bet no one will be held accountable and the major media have already moved on to other more important topics like pronoun abuse and transgenderism.

The report was immediately dismissed by the liberal media as another “nothing burger” that proved the FBI did nothing wrong and nothing bad really happened.

Yeah, MSNBC, CNN and the New York Times, nothing wrong has happened inside our government.

Except that thanks in large part to your dishonest journalism, the FBI, the CIA, Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their Democratic pals were able to get away with undermining the foundations of the country.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

AOC and her Green New Deal buddies in the Biden government are not just winning their crusade against fossil fuels.

They’re also wrecking the country – appliance by appliance.

Our washing machines, refrigerators and microwaves have already been made less efficient and more expensive because of new federal standards pushed by fanatical environmentalists who think like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Not long ago, government regulators were caught planning to outlaw gas kitchen stoves in new homes and apartments because they make climate change worse and can supposedly kill us by emitting 12.3 molecules of un-burned CO2 per breakfast.

Then last week, the green crusaders running Biden’s Department of Energy went after America’s most sacred appliance – the dishwasher.

A proposed new rule would limit dishwashers to using 3.2 gallons of water per cycle instead of 5 gallons, and it would require manufacturers to reduce a dishwasher’s energy consumption by nearly 30%.

Federal regulators promise, as they always do, that the new dishwasher standards will not only help to fight the climate crisis, they will eventually save homeowners $652 million a year in utility and water costs.

I’m not good with math, but since there are about 100 million U.S. homes with dishwashers, I think that comes out to $6.52 a year per household – about 13 whopping cents a week.

Of course, based on what happened years ago when we got new federal rules mandating less water use for washing machines and toilets, we know what these stricter dishwasher standards will mean in the real world.

It means we’ll have to run the new dishwashers twice to get our plates as clean as the old models.

Speaking of insanity, as part of their holy crusade to save the planet from climate change, AOC’s soulmates in the Environmental Protection Agency currently are drawing up rules that, according to Politico, could mean the end of most of our power plants that burn coal, natural gas and oil to generate our electricity.

The EPA’s new plans, which thankfully are a long way from becoming law, would require most fossil fuel-powered plants to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution 90 percent by 2040 — or shut down.

The new rules, which involve all kinds of untested and expensive scientific tricks to capture and store carbon, could be thrown out by a new administration or killed by Congress before they do much damage.

Let’s pray that sensible people take over the White House soon and tell the EPA to shove their proposed rule in the nearest coal-fired waste incinerator.

Meanwhile, it should be obvious by now that “energy regressives” like AOC in the Biden government are hell-bent on wiping out the burning of fossil fuels – which currently produce about 60 percent of our electrical power.

They irrationally hate the energy resources that built America’s wealth and want us to sacrifice our hard-won high standard of living and some of our basic freedoms to save the purity of their almighty false god – the climate.

They actually believe that in the future it’ll be possible for our dynamic economy to rely on pricey and impractical “clean” energy sources like wind and solar to power the all-electric country of their dreams.

They don’t care whose lives they make poorer or harder with their foolish environmental laws, whether here in America or Africa or anywhere else.

AOC and her fellow crusading Green New Dealers in and out of government claim to be the infallible experts of the incredibly complex science of climate change and the great threat it poses to us and the planet.

But they really are a bunch of dangerous religious nuts who are armed with a lot of government power they shouldn’t have.

So excuse me if I don’t believe them when they say my kitchen stove is going to kill me.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Haven’t we seen this never-ending story before?

It’s just that the politics have flipped.

When we had Democrats in power in the House, all we heard were bad stories about Donald Trump.

All we heard from Democrats and their parrots in the major media was how Trump supposedly broke a bunch of laws and should be impeached, imprisoned or hanged for things like colluding with the Russians, dodging his taxes and golfing too much.

One by one, those fake stories would fizzle out and nothing would happen.

Then congressman Adam Schiff – my representative here in Los Angeles – would start showing up on “Meet the Press” again, spewing lies about a fresh batch of classified documents he had seen but couldn’t describe in detail that “proved” Trump was guilty of some new high crime and misdemeanor.

And then that fake story would fizzle and nothing would come of it ….

The American public had to live through that crap for four years, with Democrats trying desperately to knock Trump out of the White House and Republicans arguing Trump did nothing wrong.

Fast-forward to 2023 and it’s the Republicans in the House who are trying to bring down President Biden.

Republican committees are hot to get Biden impeached for enriching his son Hunter and the rest of his extended crime family by making secret deals with the Chinese, the Ukrainians and any other foreign country that played Biden’s slimy influence-selling game.

Are the next two, four, or, God help us, eight years of investigating Biden Inc. going to play out the same way the Trump years did?

Are we going to have a series of reports about Biden family corruption from Republican guard dogs Jim Jordan and Jim Comer that make a lot of news, raise threats of impeachment – and then fizzle out into nothingness?

I sure hope not.

It’s not that I wouldn’t want to see the “Big Guy” and all the little Bidens brought to justice for whatever it is they’ve done wrong to make themselves rich.

But Republicans are in danger of being accused of wasting a lot of time and energy on what Democrats might call “Biden Derangement Syndrome.”

Aren’t there a few other issues of greater national importance that a Republican House can tackle?

Like plugging the leak at the Mexican border? Fighting inflation and fixing the economy? Balancing the federal budget? Ending the war in Ukraine?

The Republican rightwing is hoping and praying that President Biden will be found guilty of something – anything – and forced from office.

The leaks about him and his family from whistleblowers inside the FBI and elsewhere are starting to trickle out and House committee members are hinting that they will be bombshells.

But, like with Trump, we haven’t seen any evidence. The Republicans say they’ve got the goods on Biden, and maybe they do. But are they and whatever else they find going to fizzle out into a bunch of nothing burgers?

I’m getting to the point where I don’t care what Biden and his dirty family have done wrong, criminally or morally, or if they are ever punished for it.

In fact, as bad as President Biden has been for America, I’m secretly hoping he remains in office until he’s defeated in the 2024 election.

Having a crime syndicate operating out of the White House for another two years is not good for the country. But it’s 100 percent better than having Kamala Harris in charge of us for one minute.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Joe Biden lies.

He stumbles.

He has the beginnings of dementia.

Everything Fox News says about his incompetence and his horrible domestic and foreign policies is absolutely true.

Everyone knows America will be more prosperous and safe when he is no longer in the White House.

But Joe Biden isn’t leaving. He’s decided he can run for re-election in 2024 for one simple reason – the Republican Party nomination is in the pocket of Donald Trump.

I’m not a Never Trumper. I voted for him twice and I think he did a good job as president. But like everyone else with an un-MAGA-fogged brain, I’m worn out by his antics and personal legal troubles.

I get it. People love him. He got 75 million Republican votes in 2020.

But the Democrats have at least an equal number of voters, plus the biased and corrupt major media are solidly in Biden’s corner – especially if his opponent is Trump.

That means Biden can run for president again from his basement and no one but Republicans will complain.

Biden’s most fervent naptime prayer right now is, “Please, GOP, nominate Donald Trump.”

That’s because Old Joe knows Republicans have some great governors out there in Georgia, Texas, Virginia and, of course Florida, who are tanned, rested and ready.

Biden knows he couldn’t beat any of them. The only person he could beat in 2024 is Donald Trump, and he’s only in the race because Trump is.

Meanwhile, as part of their grand plan for 2024 and beyond, I predict that the Democrat Party honchos are going to have Kamala Harris leave the vice president spot next year and replace Merrick Garland as U.S. attorney general.

That move will create an opening for Gavin Newsom to come in as the new VP and insure that our current national embarrassment will never become president if Biden dies or has to retire for medical or mental reasons.

Replacing Harris also opens the door for Newsom to run for president in 2028, which unfortunately for the country he’s wanted to do even before he discovered hair gel.

So there you go. In my opinion, if Trump stays in Biden runs and wins again in 2024.

If a higher power has mercy on America and strikes Biden dead two months from now, Newsom, the only slugger on the Democrat bench, will throw his hat in the ring, crush Harris and anyone else in the 2024 Democrat primary and lose in the fall to one of our great governors.

The only hope Republicans have to regain the White House and save America comes down to Donald Trump having the decency to step aside, take credit for having been a great president and get enthusiastically behind the Republican 2024 nominee.

If Trump runs and Biden and the Democrat vote machine beat him again, which is likely, he’ll be finished — and disgraced. He’ll have no credibility or clout in the GOP. His political legacy will be having been a selfish, two-time loser.

But if instead he does the honorable thing,Trump will drop out and urge his army of diehard supporters to elect the Republican nominee.

I know it’s asking a lot. But the country cannot survive another four years of Bidenism.

As I’ve written before, Trump’s America First movement showed the Republican Party the way to win the White House and saved us from the long nightmare of President Hillary.

Now it’s up to him to end his amazing political career on the high ground and prove he truly cares more for the future of the Republican Party and, more important, the future of the country than he cares about himself.

Donald, with all due respect, it’s time for you to do the right, decent and patriotic thing and hand the GOP’s reins over to someone else.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Violent events in the last few days prove how edgy Americans are.

A 16-year-old boy who knocked on the wrong door was shot through the glass by a scared old man.

A cheerleader was shot because she pulled into the wrong driveway.

Another person was shot after she accidentally got in the wrong car at a shopping center.

Everyone is so on edge today because of the madness and lawlessness they see on TV and the Internet.

Every day brings new video of gas station smash-and-grabs, flash mobs looting retail stores, mini-riots taking over streets in downtown Chicago, teens fighting and shooting at each other.

In a country of 335 million people, you are always going to see disturbing images of people doing horrible stuff to each other, committing property crimes and breaking the peace.

But way too much bad stuff is going on in America.

The people in charge of our cities – the politicians who for decades have wrecked them with their social welfare policies – have no idea what’s wrong or how to fix it.

The new idiot mayor of Chicago, for example, said the kids who ran riot in his downtown just needed something to do – they needed jobs, he said.

But that’s BS and everyone but the mayor of Chicago knows it.

Jobs for kids and young adults are plentiful everywhere. There isn’t a street or shopping center in the land that doesn’t have a dozen ‘Help Wanted’ signs taped to its windows.

The real problem is too many kids don’t actually want to work – and no one makes them.

There are many more credible explanations – and excuses – for the rising lawlessness that’s put so many Americans on edge.

Some politicians and “experts” try to tell us it’s caused by poverty, systemic racism or our broken education system – which they broke.

I’m no sociologist, but the fact that a quarter of our kids – more than 20 million – grow up without a father in the home is probably the chief reason for the explosion of so many lawless young men.

But another reason is because of how poorly millions of kids are being raised and how seldom we hold them accountable when they do something wrong – starting when they’re little.

The act of disciplining children has become virtually extinct – and morally verboten. Parents are told they can’t spank their kids anymore. Schools have long ago forbidden corporal punishment.

It’s no wonder so many kids grow up and turn into monsters who think they can do or take whatever they want and have no sense of what is right or wrong.

Even when they set a cop car on fire, smash store windows or loot a convenience store, they are not held accountable, not arrested, not put in jail, not even identified and shamed.

Today, there’s almost no accountability for bad acts by young people. They have gotten so wild I think it might be time to start kennel training them.

I have a new shepherd puppy named Shadow. In a little over two weeks I have him kennel trained and potty-trained. I say, “Sit,” and he sits. I say “Bed” and he goes to his bed.

Kids and dogs are really not that different. If you let dogs run wild, they’ll poop in your living room, chew up your furniture and bite people.

You have to teach puppies not to do those things – and hold them accountable when they disobey – so they’ll grow up to be good dogs.

It’s not that complicated, really: Holding kids accountable when they are young helps them grow up to be good men and women.

It will sound crazy to anyone under 30, but I was lucky I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s.

My mother kept me in line and accountable with her riding crop. The nuns in school used their rulers. The priests used their paddles.

And I’m glad they did.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

My governor Gavin Newsom has finally found an excuse to get out of the state he’s been tyrannizing for the last three years.

He’s going around to red states like Florida, telling them how they’re the ones that are doing everything wrong.

While Newsom is AWOL, which actually is a good thing for the over-taxed people of California, the state continues to fall apart.

Its great cities continue to suffer from high crime and homelessness.

Its budget deficit for 2023 is $22 billion. And so many people are moving away that California is leading the country in net population loss.

The Golden State has a ton of economic and social problems, most of them politically made by “progressives” like Newsom.

Its once renowned infrastructure continues to crumble, and its electricity and natural gas prices are twice as high as other states.

We all know Newsom has his eyes, ears and deeply-bleeding heart set on moving into the White House in 2024.

For months it’s been as clear as his hair gel that he’s scheming to become either Biden’s new VP or replace poor Old Joe on the top of the Democrat ticket.

But based on his low career batting average in the minors, a President Newsom is guaranteed to be a major disaster for the whole country.

As mayor of San Francisco and then as governor, he failed to fix the state’s exploding homeless problem – despite his big promises.

And no Californian will ever forget the damage Gov. Newsom did to businesses and school kids with his strict, long and arbitrary lockdowns during the pandemic.

As governor he’s also blown a lot of money and hot air on environmental issues, especially climate change.

He’s a true believer in the fight to save the planet by reducing carbon emissions and destroying the fossil fuel industries that have made our lives richer, healthier and easier.

Newsom and his fellow zealots are so super-worried about the threat of global climate change that they think it’s OK to pass laws that force ordinary people to buy expensive electric cars.

In pursuit of reaching zero-emissions by 2035, the state of California is requiring 35 percent of new cars sold in 2026 and 68 percent in 2030 to be electric. About 19 percent of cars sold here last year were zero-emissions.

The Biden Administration – knowing a terrible California law when it sees it – has announced similar standards for the rest of the country that will force 66 percent of cars sold in 2032 to be electric cars.

But right now only 6 percent of America’s cars are electric – for sensible reasons.

As the Corvette-loving Biden family knows, EVs are expensive, don’t go far enough on a “tank” of electricity and need to have their batteries charged at charging stations we don’t have enough of yet.

A Tesla Model S is great. It has a range of 405 miles – and costs $96,000. Everyone would love to own one – if they could afford to buy it and keep it charged.

A Chevy Bolt EV is more affordable at about $27,000. But its range is only 259 miles on a single charge and no one in Newsom’s circle would risk being caught driving one, especially across a desert.

Of course, this foolish and unreachable plan to save the planet by forcing us into EVs is just another example of government making you buy something that it thinks you should have but you don’t want.

But it doesn’t matter to Newsom and other environmental crazies that everything the doomsayers have said about climate since the 1970s has not come true.

Global cooling … global warming … and now climate change…. It doesn’t matter.

If Al Gore and the other climate experts knew what they were talking about, by now the Greenland ice sheet would be half-melted and the offices of the New York Times would be under 30 feet of water.

Which, come to think of it, might not be such a bad thing.

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Everyone knows the felony charges against Donald Trump for paying hush-money to a porn star are ridiculous.

Everyone knows that charging Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records was just a slimy political stunt by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Everyone knows that Bragg’s legally dubious indictment is just the latest desperate attempt by Democrats to prevent Trump from running for president in 2024.

And, along with a handful of honest Democrats and liberal media pundits, even diehard Trump-hater Mitt Romney admits that Bragg’s “overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents and damages the public’s faith in our justice system.”

But Bragg and the Democrats are not only making a laughing stock out of our judicial system.

They are also making our visibly shaky and untrustworthy electoral system look like something you’d see in a corrupt banana republic or communist dictatorship.

You’d think they and their disreputable cheerleaders in the news media would have bigger things to worry about than hounding Trump in court over fake crimes from seven years ago.

For starters, how about securing the southern border they’ve flung wide open to illegal immigrants, human traffickers and deadly drugs?

How about fighting the inflation they’ve caused with their policies? Or doing something to fight the crime, violence and squalor that they have allowed to turn the downtowns of some of our greatest cities into hellholes?

Instead Bragg and the Democrats are charging the ex-president of the United States over a non-disclosure agreement he signed in 2016 with Stormy Daniels.

NDAs are part of the American corporate and political woodwork.

CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS, PBS and hundreds of other business and government places have no doubt used NDAs and six-figure payouts to quietly settle sexual harassment and racial discrimination claims.

And remember the Office of Compliance?

Congress secretly created it in the 1990s to pay off and quietly shut up people who charged they had been sexually harassed or discriminated against by members of Congress.

That embarrassing office is never on the media’s radar, but it’s still open for business. As of 2017, when its existence was made public, it had paid more than 230 victims $17 million – of taxpayers’ money.

At least Trump paid Daniels with his own money. But that doesn’t matter. Whatever he does is always declared a special crime, according to his enemies, though he’s never been convicted of anything.

I’m no big fan of Trump. But for him to get a fair trial in New York City, where judges are elected and 80 percent of the people voted for Biden, won’t be possible.

Convicting him will also be impossible. Bragg’s case will be thrown out by the first honest appellate judge that looks at it.

Bragg has to know that, but he and the Democrats don’t care. They’re not looking for justice, just political points, and they’ve already scored them by cheating.

Arresting the leading contender for president on trumped up charges may backfire politically for the Democrats in 2024, but what they did this week was a shot that will be heard in capitals around the world for a long time.

For almost a century we’ve been the country that criticizes foreign governments for doing things like throwing their political opponents in jail and not running fair and free elections.

Now countries half as free as us are telling us we no longer have the right to lecture them about democracy.

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, said from now on it’s going to be very hard for the U.S. “to condemn ‘political persecution’ in other countries” – and he’s right.

That’s why this dirty Democrat game really tees me off.

What they did this week took the United States to the lowest level it’s been in my lifetime.

We watched my father’s “Shining City on the Hill” get blown up and hurt badly by a partisan road-side bomb – and that IED was set off by Bragg and the Democrats.

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.