Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

McAllen, Texas, woke up this week.

After 150-some years of electing only Democrats, a predominantly Latino congressional district in the Rio Grande Valley shocked the Democrat Party and the liberal media on Tuesday by choosing a Republican.

Mayra Flores, who won the special election, is an attractive Mexican-born woman married to a border patrol agent.

She easily defeated her opponent by pushing family values and Republican issues like border insecurity, soaring inflation and high gas prices.

Flores showed that Latinos – who are mostly middle-class, hardworking, conservative and family-oriented – are getting less and less fond of the Democratic Party all the time.

She proved that like the majority of Americans, Latinos have had enough of Joe Biden’s “Wreck America” policies, which in less than two years have sabotaged the world’s strongest economy, got us into a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and made Jimmy Carter look like he was not the last century’s most incompetent president.

Flores’ win in Texas was good news for Republicans.

But for California and the rest of America, thanks to the Biden-Pelosi Democrats, the news this week is dismal-as-usual.

California still has gas prices in the mid-$6 range per gallon and spiking crime rates.

It also has a major drought in the Los Angeles area caused by a lousy government water management policy.

And, most sadly, it still has Gov. Gavin Newsom who, despite his authoritarian COVID-19 mandates, bad judgment and unlikeable personality, will probably be reelected this fall.

Newsom is a poster boy for Democrat politicians whose everyday lives are unaffected by the awful decisions they have been making for decades.

He’s a wealthy elitist who will never feel the pain of $6-a-gallon gasoline or the decimation of his 401(k).

He’ll never have to do without chicken or beef – or a private plane or armed 24/7 security.

And no one in his family will ever have to do what my son Cameron is doing now – stocking up on infant formula for the baby he and his wife expect in December.

The California that Newsom and his liberal predecessors have created is a mini version of the green, crazy and dysfunctional America that the Biden-Pelosi-AOC Democrats in Washington are desperately trying to shove down our throats.

President Biden has tried to blame all the problems he and his party have caused for America on Republicans, Donald Trump and everyone’s favorite villain, Vladimir Putin.

I agree Putin is a bad and dangerous man. And his invasion of Ukraine has added to the rise of oil, gas and wheat prices around the world.

But last I heard, Putin has not been blowing up our oil wells in Texas or hoarding tampons.

While Biden’s attempt to punish Putin and Russia with economic sanctions has not worked, it’s the American people who’ve have been suffering.

Empty store shelves, shortages of basics, inflation, high interest rates …. It’s starting to look like 1979 America again under Jimmy Carter.

Under Carter we had high inflation, high unemployment and double-digit interest rates.

We had long lines at gas stations, too, but we didn’t have empty shelves and we still could go to a store and find baby formula and meat.

The people of California and the rest of America are being tortured by the same set of bad ideas and policies dreamed up by Democrats who are hopelessly out of touch with the people they represent – especially Latinos like the ones in Texas who elected Mayra Flores.

Flores will have to defend her seat in November when her district is combined with another district that has a strong Democrat incumbent, but her victory is a hopeful sign that the Red wave we expect this fall will flush Democrats out of power in some surprising places.

The only other good news this week for America’s future is laughable – Dr. Fauci proved that the virus is no longer the virus of the unvaccinated.

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Copyright 2022 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

Matthew McConaughey was the star of this week’s gun drama in Washington.

Two weeks after the slaughter of 19 school children in his hometown of Uvalde, Texas, the actor made an emotional appeal for stronger gun control measures.

McConaughey got – and deserved — praise for much of what he said in the White House briefing room on Tuesday.

Sure, he was a celebrity prop being exploited by President Biden and House Democrats to sell their hysterical and unconstitutional gun control ideas to the American public.

But while McConaughey is definitely no closet conservative Republican, he owns and shoots guns and is not a stereotypical Hollywood liberal who wants to disarm every American citizen – except their own bodyguards, of course.

In a city full of Democrats exploiting the latest national tragedy for their own political gain, McConaughey came across as refreshingly reasonable, sensible and bipartisan on several gun-control issues.

Most Americans would agree with him that you should be 21 before you are allowed to buy an AR-15.

Most Americans would agree with him that there should be a cooling off period between the time you buy a handgun and the time you get it.

And most Americans would also favor his call for the increased use of “red flag” laws that allow authorities to take guns away from mentally disturbed persons who are a threat to themselves or the rest of us.

McConaughey’s rational approach to solving a highly contentious and seemingly unsolvable political issue reminded me of another movie actor I knew pretty well – Ronald Reagan.

Whenever my father was negotiating with Democrats or his own party to get legislation passed, the first thing he’d do was sit down and find all the things both sides agreed on.

Then he’d say, “Let’s write and pass a bill containing those points and we’ll argue about the other stuff later.”

In today’s hyper-partisan politics it just doesn’t happen that way.

This week the Democrats running the House put on a big emotional show to show how much they cared about the Uvalde massacre and then passed a super-strict gun control bill aimed at pleasing only their core voters.

Pelosi and her crew knew the bill would never pass in the 50-50 Senate.

Yet they were so determined to politically exploit the deaths of 19 school kids that only two weeks later they thought it was a good idea to bring in families from Uvalde to testify before a committee – and relive the horror and rekindle the grief.

Reducing future mass shootings in schools is not merely a matter of taking away the guns of everyone, including law abiding citizens.

Democrats think it’s that simple, but even an actor like McConaughey knows it’s not true.

He knows it’s going to take a mix of solutions, including making schools safer and hiring armed school guards.

Some of McConaughey’s ideas have already been put into law at the state level.

A bunch of states – including California and Florida – already have five-day cooling off periods to buy a handgun. And in California, if you’ve never bought ammo before, there’s even a three-day waiting period.

People wonder what Ronald Reagan would do about guns in the wake of these tragic mass shootings.

Well, first he’d find the areas of agreement between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and get them to write a bill.

Cooling off period? Not a problem. Age limit for AR-15s? Not a problem. Red-flag laws that are actually enforced? Not a problem.

Then he’d say, “Pass the bill and bring it to my desk and I’ll sign it.”

But he’d also add this caveat — “But you do realize all this could be done by the states – and it should be.”

Then my father would give a prime-time national address calling on governors and state legislatures to pass the federal legislation at the state level.

One thing President Reagan wouldn’t do? Go on late-night TV and chat about gun control with Jimmy Kimmel.

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Copyright 2022 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

Why is it that whenever we dig into the details of a mass shooting we wind up finding nothing but screw ups?

Police, schools, mental health officials, parents – they’ve all messed up in ways to make mass shootings possible or deadlier.

At the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, we learned that police responded within minutes but then stood around for almost an hour in the hallway while the shooter was barricaded in a classroom and still killing children.

We learned that there was no armed security guard stationed at the Robb school that day and that a door to the outside – which the shooter used to enter the building – did not lock automatically as it should have.

We also learned that the 18-year-old killer, as is so often the case, was known by his family, the authorities and his schoolmates to be a mentally unstable and scary gun nut, yet no one “red-flagged” him as a potential threat to himself or others.

And how many times have we heard stories about how the parents of future mass murderers continued to let them have access to guns even after it had become obvious to them that their children were dangerously disturbed?

What we’ve seen over and over again in these mass shootings is that everyone’s waiting for someone else to do the right things, but then no one does the right things.

It’s not that hard to protect a school from being invaded by a mass murderer – if we have the will.

Just as we do at airports, rock concerts and Super Bowls, we can use high fences, gates and automatically locking doors (that work).

We can also hire full-time security guards who are well armed, well trained and not afraid to shoot anyone dead who shows up at a school and tries to kill people.

A school guard without a gun is just a spectator at a slaughter — or another victim.

But Democrats and the liberal media are so mindlessly in favor of stricter and stricter gun control that they’ll never understand that the best way to prevent a tragedy like the one in Uvalde is more guns – guns in the right hands.

Following the massacre in Texas, the anti-gun nuts again instantly proved how little they know about “the weapons of war” they desperately want to take away from us law-abiding citizens.

I don’t think three Democrats in Congress could define what an assault weapon actually is, much less explain the difference between a semi-automatic AR-15, a high-powered deer rifle and an Uzi.

And this week we heard President Biden babbling on about the difference in stopping power between a 9mm handgun – the most commonly produced pistol in the U.S. – and a .22 pistol.

Biden said he wants to ban high-caliber 9mm handguns like Glocks, which are used by most police forces and the security guards who protect him 24/7, because he thinks no one needs a gun for protection that is so powerful it “can blow the lung out of a body.”

Just to let him know, it was a .22 that almost killed my dad.

Many assassins use a .22 because when the smaller bullet enters your body it bounces off your bones like a ping pong ball and causes greater internal damage.

No one expects Biden to know what he’s talking about when he talks about guns, and the dishonest major media are too much on the gun-control team to discuss other sensible, doable ways of preventing future school shootings.

Putting well-armed security guards in our schools is extremely important, obviously, but it is parents who are the first line of defense.

If you realize your kid is out of control and truly dangerous, take their guns away. Give them to a neighbor. Lock them in a safe.

And please don’t wait for the government, the school principal or anyone else to red flag your child as a threat to themselves or others.

Do the right thing. Throw the red flag yourself.

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Copyright 2022 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

On and on it goes.

Another lone wacko, a white 18-year-old, went on a well-planned killing spree in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood of Buffalo.

It was a terrible, tragic, evil, obviously racist act.

Ten innocent people died and three were injured last weekend – 11 victims were Black.

We know the “alleged” killer was a white supremacist, an anti-Semite and a nut-job who clearly set out to kill Black people because of what he posted online.

Predictably, President Biden seized on the slaughter in Buffalo as further “proof” of his bogus claim that “the poison” of white supremacy poses the greatest threat to America today.

Also predictably, Biden and the usual liberal chorus of media outlets tried to link the country’s latest mass killing to Republicans, guns and Fox News stars like Tucker Carlson.

Biden went to Buffalo to show his sympathy for the victims, which is fine.

But as usual he was very selective when pointing out recent examples of racially motivated mass murders.

No mention of the angry “Black supremacist” who plowed through a parade of white men, women and children at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisc., last year, killing six and injuring 60.

No mention of the mentally troubled Black man – another racist “Black supremacist” who openly hated whites, Asians and even some Blacks — who shot up a New York City subway train last month and injured 10 people.

No mention of another apparently mentally troubled Black man who’s accused of shooting but not killing three Korean women in a Dallas hair salon last week.

And you know the Bidens won’t be visiting the Geneva Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods in Southern California to show their sympathy for the deadly shooting that happened there earlier this week.

The Asian shooter – an American citizen born in Taiwan – planned to kill many members of the congregation, who are Taiwanese, because he doesn’t think Taiwan should be independent of China.

Like the other shootings, that potential mass shooting, which was stopped when members of the church overpowered the shooter, did not fit the Biden-media narrative that the only kind of racism in America is white and that mass murderers come in only one color and one kind of politics.

The reaction to the Buffalo tragedy by Biden, the Democrats and the liberal media was the usual “We need more, more, still more gun laws.”

But how about enforcing the damn gun laws we’ve already got?

How about putting some teeth in so-called “Red Flag” laws?

Though ripe for abuse by gun-control zealots, they allow law enforcement in states like New York to take weapons away from people who’ve been deemed threats to themselves or others.

The punk in Buffalo still legally had his guns even though he had made threatening remarks in high school last year about shooting up a graduation ceremony and had undergone a mental health evaluation and counseling.

And how about holding parents accountable for not taking their wacko sons’ guns away?

We count on the government to take guns away from dangerous or crazy people.

But if you’re a parent and you have a whacked out son you’re worried about, lock up your damn guns. Get them out of the house.

Don’t wait for government to take them away because the government is sure not going to take them.

Meanwhile, while Biden was in Buffalo exploiting that tragedy for his own political purposes, he also predictably forgot to mention the massacre of Blacks that occurs every weekend in Chicago.

Last weekend 33 people there were shot and five died. As usual, most were young Black males shot by other young Black males.

Of course we all know why the president will never have time to go to Chicago to grieve over its murder victims: he wouldn’t be able to blame its recurring weekly slaughter on white supremacy.

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Copyright 2022 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

That’s the big news story of the week.

In the richest country in the world, new mothers are not able to find baby formula or are having to stand in line for hours to get it.

That problem is at the top – for now – of the growing pile of economic blunders and social miseries that Joe Biden and his failing policies have caused the American people.

Our Teleprompter-dependent president denies any responsibility for screwing up the country in any way, but every voter knows the grim list.

In just 15 months on the job – or pretending to be on the job – he and his collection of left-liberal “experts” have brought us 8 percent inflation, sky high gas prices and food shortages.

And don’t forget supply chain disruptions, 5 percent mortgage interest rates and soaring crime rates at home, plus an unnecessary and increasingly dangerous entanglement in a war between Russia and Ukraine.

On Thursday, the Biden administration finally acknowledged the baby formula shortage, blamed greedy formula makers and put forth the usual blather but of course took no responsibility for it.

When COVID was exported by China to the U.S., President Trump launched “Operation Warp Speed” to produce vaccines in record time without the usual lengthy FDA rules.

What we need for baby formula is something like “Operation Warp Feed,” as someone on TV quipped, but don’t look at anything like that from Biden.

Like all Democrats, he’s following his party’s traditional game plan:

First you destroy something that’s working well in the private economy – like the energy industry – with a series of bad laws and policies that drive up prices or cause shortages.

And then you offer “free” government money to the victims and announce expensive new programs to fix the problems while pretending you didn’t cause them in the first place.

Biden either ignores the economic or social problems he’s created from scratch or made much worse and blames them on someone else.

Oil prices through the roof? Putin did it, not Biden’s green energy policies or his sabotage of the energy sector.

Economy sinking toward recession? Republicans did it – though they’re not in control of Congress.

Inflation and $7 a gallon gas in L.A.? Trump did it – though he’s been out of the Oval Office since January of 2021.

Lately, according to Biden and the Democrats, the soaring prices of oil, gas and wheat are Putin’s or Russia’s fault.

It’s a strange twist.

It used to be during the Cold War that Soviet leaders blamed the USSR’s Third World standard of living on America and capitalism – not on socialism and a rigid command economy run by backward bureaucrats.

Remember how we used to laugh at the Soviets – or feel sorry for its citizens – because they had to wait seven years to get a “new” and crummy car?

Or how they couldn’t buy Levi’s or Beatles records and had to line up each day to buy basics like bread and toilet paper?

Now the Biden government is turning the U.S. into the old Soviet Union.

Baby formula is just the latest important product that has been transformed from something a new mother could always buy anywhere into a nerve-wracking ordeal.

Overnight, the simple act of buying baby formula has become a national problem – like trying to get a new car.

My son ordered a Ford Expedition last November – and it’s still not built, thanks to the shortage of computer chips.

As Biden and his crew of lefties are turning the U.S. into the old USSR, there’s no one in the country who wakes up happier every morning than Jimmy Carter.

Compared to Biden’s dismal record, Old Jimmy looks like Winston Churchill and his legacy is looking better and better every day.

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Copyright 2022 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

Forget inflation, forget Ukraine, forget the crashing stock market.

Thanks to a troublemaking leak by some jerk inside the U.S. Supreme Court, abortion is dominating the front pages of our media again.

The leak of the first draft of a majority decision by the Supremes to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that legalized abortion in the U.S., has reignited the abortion issue overnight.

Pro-life, pro-abortion, pro-choice, anti-abortion….

Abortion is a hot and ugly moral and political issue that is always smoldering under the national  landscape like a coalmine fire that can never be put out.

But the prospect of the court deciding to strike down Roe v. Wade has sent angry protestors into the streets and sparked a thousand fiery editorials.

Liberal politicians, naturally, are calling for the elimination of the Senate filibuster or the packing of the Supreme Court to protect Roe v. Wade from conservative judges.

The abortion case before the high court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is from the state of Mississippi.

It doesn’t outlaw all abortion in Mississippi, as you might think if you only watched TV, but it forbids it after the 15^th week of pregnancy.

As Supreme Court Justice Alito, the author of the leaked draft, says, reasonably, there has to be a point during a pregnancy where you say, “No, you can’t abort the child.”

From the uproar this week you’d think Mississippi is trying to employ woman-crushing abortion rules handed down from caveman times.

But other states already have laws with similar cutoff times to protect the unborn from murderous late-term abortions.

And though you rarely hear it from the liberal media, abortions are far more available and much easier to get at a later time in America than around the world.

Only six other countries beside the U.S. allow on-demand abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy: Canada, China, Netherlands, North Korea, Singapore and Vietnam.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned because it was a poorly reasoned and constitutionally faulty decision, as many legal scholars have argued for decades, you won’t see me shedding any tears.

I’m pro-life for moral, religious and selfish reasons.

I’m glad I wasn’t aborted by my unmarried birth mother and was instead adopted in 1945 by Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman.

As I’ve written before, I’m also glad my adoptive mother Jane Wyman and my stepmother Nancy Reagan were both adopted as infants and not aborted.

I often think about how different the world would have been if all three of us had not been adopted but aborted.

So here we are fighting again over abortion, which seems to never go away.

What does go away – forever — are the children who are aborted every year and never get the chance to be adopted.

That’s why, when I speak to pro-life groups, I always point out that there are 400,000 foster kids in this country looking for forever parents.

Any Christian looking to adopt a child ought to be looking to bring one of them home.

Also, states need to pass laws to make it easier and faster to adopt American kids, because one reason children are aborted instead of being carried to term and put up for adoption is that governments have made it so difficult to adopt.

At the same time parents – particularly fathers – need to be more like Jesus Christ.

Just as Christ died for all our sins, fathers in the USA need to get on that Cross for their young daughters who get pregnant.

Instead of driving your daughter out of the house because of her mistake, or because you don’t want to be embarrassed by her pregnancy, why not embrace her with a loving heart as Christ would?

Supporting your pregnant daughter would be a small but important step parents could take to reduce the number of abortions.

Instead of chasing her to the nearest abortion clinic, she’ll be loved by you at home and bear a child that might grow up and change the world for the better.

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Copyright 2022 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

Should I be offended by the fact I never got kicked off Old Twitter?

Its wokesters-in-charge must have missed some of the mean things I tweeted about Dr. Fauci, Joe Biden and MSNBC’s insufferable and barely watched Joy Reid.

Old Twitter never gave me a blue check mark to prove I’m really me, either.

But maybe Elon Musk will give me one when he officially takes over and retools Twitter into the free, open and politically diverse Internet forum for debate, commentary and verbal egg-throwing that it should be.

Free speech is the last thing the liberal-left mob wants, of course, which is why they are in full meltdown mode this week over Musk’s purchase of Big Tech’s most influential bullhorn of information and opinion.

“O my God, someone who truly believes in free speech has bought Twitter!

“What if he lets just anyone tweet whatever disinformation they want about the ineffectiveness of COVID vaccines or Hunter Biden’s laptop!”

The left didn’t have a problem with Old Twitter being owned by a billionaire plutocrat as long as it was one of their billionaire plutocrats.

Democrats and the liberal media weren’t worried about Old Twitter’s harmful influence on political discourse as long as its in-house thought police threw the right people like President Trump and Tucker Carlson off the platform.

And I guess everything was equally peachy as long as Old Twitter’s computer engineers rigged the algorithms to make sure the “wrong” political ideas, government criticisms or even jokes were shadow banned or deep-sixed entirely.

But now when a zillionaire who believes in absolute free speech for all buys Twitter and breaks up the left’s monopoly on Big Tech, the future of democracy in America is at risk?

Really?

From Left Coast to Left Coast, Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the liberal media mob are whining that under Musk an un-moderated and non-partisan New Twitter will be able to affect election results and spread disinformation.

But come on, man.

Is there anyone who hasn’t noticed that for the last decade the left has been using Twitter, Facebook, Google and the social media to influence elections, censor their political enemies and push their poisonous political and cultural ideas on the rest of us?

With their hysterical reactions to Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the left has shown the whole country what rotten hypocrites they really are.

They don’t believe in free speech – not for you, anyway. They never did. They believed only in free speech for themselves.

Old Twitter being purchased by a non-leftist who actually believes in free speech for everyone is not a threat to democracy, it’s a threat to the authoritarian left.

The left is all about being in control – government control of everything from education to health care and information – and limiting individual choice wherever possible.

In reaction to Musk’s promise to turn Old Twitter into a non-partisan, transparent, open market of information and free expression, the control freaks running the Biden administration have just decided to set themselves up as arbiters of disinformation.

This week they announced the formation of a “Disinformation Governance Board, ” which sounds like something George Orwell wished he had thought of for his great book “1984.”

The board’s Orwellian and dangerously open-ended job is “to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security and will reportedly focus ‘specifically’ on irregular migration and Russia.”

While we wait to see if publicizing the information contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop meets the board’s definition of disinformation, it’s not hard to predict that Musk and New Twitter are going to be harassed or punished by at least a few federal regulatory agencies.

The control freaks of the left will try to do anything they can to hurt Musk for being a free speech absolutist because they only agree with their own speech.

So beware, Elon.

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Copyright 2022 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

A friend of mine from back east once told me what he said was wrong with the country.

“Readers are leaders,” he said. “Unfortunately, our leaders don’t read.”

I was reminded of that sharp-eyed observation this week after a federal judge in Florida struck down the CDC’s widely hated mask mandate for travelers.

The reaction to the mandate reversal by the pro-mask zealots and their allies in the liberal national media was hysterical, angry and predictable.

You can bet the mask worshipers are rooting for the Department of Justice’s to successfully appeal the judge’s ruling and reinstate the CDC’s rule.

But like most Americans, I’m rooting and praying for the permanent death of the mask mandate, which should have happened a long time ago.

I’m vaxxed and boosted. I don’t care if you’re wearing a mask or not, and you shouldn’t worry about me.

If you still believe the myth that a cloth mask keeps you safe from a virus, be my guest – wear a pair of masks and a plastic helmet 24/7. Just don’t treat me like I’m a granny killer.

U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the CDC mask mandate because she concluded the public health bureaucracy had overstepped its legal authority by imposing it early last year.

Based on the misleading and biased coverage by the liberal media – which apparently didn’t actually read her decision or ignored what it said — you’d have thought the judge had ruled that wearing a mask is now illegal everywhere in the USA.

She didn’t.

What she did was simply return the decision to wear or not wear a face mask to the individual, where it always belonged.

The opponents of recent bills passed in Texas and Florida have the same lazy reading habits as the mask worshipers.

They and their allies in the liberal media immediately railed in unison against the Texas bill, as if it outlawed all abortions in the state.

But if they had been honest, or had bothered to actually read the law, they’d know the bill prohibits abortions in the state only after 15 weeks and makes the usual allowances for cases of rape, incest and the health of the mother.

Ditto regarding the misbehavior of the opponents of the newly passed bill in Florida, the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.

The bill outlaws the teaching of what is essentially the elementary school equivalent of Sex & Gender Studies 101 to little kids in public schools.

If you read the law, it says, sensibly, that public school teachers are not allowed to teach kids from kindergarten to third grade that it’s OK for them to choose to be a boy or girl, whichever they want, or, if they aren’t sure, both.

Contrary to the claims of its opponents, the Florida bill does not prohibit teachers from saying the word “gay.”

What it does is leave it up to parents to teach their kids about gender and sexual orientation – not LGBTQ+ activists intent on indoctrinating children in their pet gender theories.

The far left don’t care what the bills in Texas and Florida actually say.

They just spout their familiar claims of being discriminated against or victimized and their soulmates in the liberal media, as usual, let them get away with it.

The media, as they do so often, are failing the public in their coverage of the bills in Texas and Florida.

Not only are journalists picking sides, they are too much in bed with the left to point out that the opponents of the bills are misrepresenting, exaggerating or deliberately lying to the public about what’s in them.

It’s very hard for me to believe there are parents out there who really think it’s fine and dandy to teach their first graders that it’s OK to be bisexual if they want.

As far as I’m concerned, the teachers who feed this poison to little kids are no better than child abusers. And the liberal media are complicit in their crime.

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Copyright 2022 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

Forty years ago we had a soaring inflation rate, obscene gas prices and interest rates in the teens.

Today, thanks to their incredible incompetence, bad policies and serial stupidity, the Democrats in Washington are bringing back all those problems.

It’s getting so bad, I’m actually beginning to think Jimmy Carter was not such a bad president after all.

People under 40 have no idea how bad things were in the late 1970s under Carter.

They’ve grown up knowing only 3 percent interest rates, dirt cheap gasoline and 2 percent inflation.

They don’t know how miserable things were under Carter or how miserable they can get again under Biden.

My friend who owns a local tire store in Los Angeles doesn’t need a history book to remember how awful America was in the early 1980s because he lived through it.

When I got an oil change at his place this week, he was railing about how today’s official inflation rate of 8.5% doesn’t come close to the real figure.

“Where is the thing I’m buying that’s only gone up eight and a half?” he asked.

“The tires I’m buying aren’t only up eight and a half percent. The gas and food I’m buying are not only up eight and half.”

He’s right, and you don’t have to be Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to know it.

Earlier this week, when the new monthly inflation figures came out, Manchin, arguably the last sensible Democrat with an elected job in Washington, rattled off some of the real numbers.

Year over year, gasoline is up 48%. Beef is up 16%, chicken and milk up 13% and coffee and eggs up 11%.

Used car prices are up nearly 40% – and the wait to get a new one feels almost as long as it was in 1981 Moscow.

Democrats have created our economic and social problems themselves – in just 14 months – but they always try to blame them on bad or greedy other people.

They say that if the rich would just pay more in taxes – their so-called “fair share” – ordinary people will somehow be better off, as if the additional taxes the rich are forced to pay will go directly to needy people.

But the reality is, as the last 75 years have proven again and again, Democrat policies always hurt the poor and middle class the hardest, not the rich.

For example, I have a Ford F-150 pickup and with gas in California going for almost $6 a gallon it costs me nearly $200 for a fill up.

I can afford that, but my daughter-the-school-teacher can’t. Neither can my son, who has two young girls.

Neither can the grocery clerk or the waiter at a restaurant – but the owners of the grocery store chain or the restaurant can.

The last good Democrat president was Bill Clinton. He balanced the budget, gave us welfare reform and actually worked well with Republicans, but we’ll never see his like again.

Today we’re watching the usual Democrat horror story playing out with the added bonus of a president who does everything backwards.

President Biden, following the Democrat playbook, blames Vladimir Putin, the rich and gouging oil company CEOs for high gas prices – anyone but his administration, which caused them by shutting down pipelines and generally abusing America’s productive energy sector.

Given the way the Democrats are governing in D.C. now, things will never change for the better unless a miracle happens.

That’s what happened in 1980 when Ronald Reagan came to Washington and turned things around by lowering taxes, cutting government regulations and lifting the country’s spirits.

To many of us old-timers it feels like the early 1980s all over again.

And the only way the country will ever recover from the damage of the Biden Gang is to elect a Republican worthy of being president.

Thank God there will be many candidates.

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Copyright 2022 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

It’s a great day for America – or at least it should be.

It’s Thursday, April 7. Major League Baseball’s Opening Day.

From Los Angeles to St. Louis to Washington, D.C., 14 teams are kicking off their regular season, and by the weekend all 30 teams will be in action.

Baseball in 2022 isn’t what it used to be – but these days, what is?

In my growing-up days in the 1950s, and decades before that in my dad’s growing-up days, the whole country couldn’t wait for baseball season to start, and Opening Day was treated like an unofficial national holiday.

In nearly two dozen major league cities kids skipped school and adults ducked out early from work so they could go to the home opener, which was usually an afternoon game.

In those days, before the NFL and NBA became wealthy global brands, baseball was our undisputed national pastime.

It was the pro sport everyone in the country religiously followed for six months in the pages of the newspapers and on radio and eventually TV.

Its greatest stars – Ruth, Williams, Robinson, Mays, Mantle and a dozen others – were genuine American superheroes.

With all the tragic events going on in the world today, it would make a lot of sense for Americans to start celebrating Opening Day the way we used to.

It’d be a good excuse to turn off our TVs and smartphones and enjoy a relaxing afternoon at the baseball park – even if it’s a dome.

Grab a hot dog and a $12 beer and have some fun. Root for your favorite team. Yell at the umps – before they’re replaced by robots.

If you can’t attend in person, watch from your living room.

Either way, celebrating Opening Day for a few hours will help you forget the war in Ukraine, the murders in Chicago and the nonstop political stupidity coming out of Washington and the liberal media.

This year the National League will allow designated hitters for pitchers for the first time and “ghost runners” will be placed at second base in the 10th inning if games go into extra innings.

I don’t know what my father would think of using ghost runners, but baseball played an important part in his path to the White House.

He grew up a Chicago Cubs fan in Illinois and it was through his announcing of Cubs games on radio in the mid 1930s that he eventually found his way to Hollywood.

When my father announced the Cubs games for station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, he actually re-created the action for radio listeners by reading a ticker tape wired to him from the ballfield.

Half a century later, if you were lucky enough to sit next to him at a state dinner in the White House and wanted to talk about politics, it would never happen.

He’d rather talk to you about baseball and how he used to announce those Cubs games on radio.

He also might tell you about what happened in the middle of an inning when second baseman Tony Lazerri came up to bat and Dizzy Dean of the Cards was pitching.

As my dad was telling the audience “Dean winds up and …” the ticker tape went dead.

My dad had Lazerri foul off eight straight pitches until the ticker came back to life.

It turned out that Lazerri actually fouled out on the first pitch, but thousands of radio listeners were left thinking it was the longest at bat in baseball history.

My dad really loved baseball and I bet he’d agree with me that Opening Day is a special American “holiday” that deserves to be fully celebrated.

After all, your home team may be terrible, but there’s only one Opening Day a year. Don’t let it pass.

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Copyright 2022 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.