Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Sunday is D-Day plus 76 years.

And on Memorial Day this week we honored and mourned all the men and women who’ve died while serving in our military.

So maybe it’s a good time for politicians and pundits from both sides of the aisle to quit pointing fingers at each other for a day and start thinking about what marking the date June 6, 1944 is all about.

It’s about honoring all those young soldiers who gave their lives for us so many years ago in World War II.

It’s about remembering all those brave young men who jumped out of airplanes and stormed the beaches of a foreign country, not knowing the language but knowing they were there to free the world from Hitler and his armies.

There are only about 300,000 World War II vets still living, and they’re all in their 90s and 100s.

We thank them each year on Memorial Day and D-Day and Veterans Day, but we need to thank them every day.

It doesn’t matter where they served – Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever – they deserve our constant and bipartisan respect.

On D-Day I always think about my father and what he did to serve the country during World War II.

He badly wanted to enlist in the Army but without his glasses he was legally blind.

Because he knew he’d never pass the Army’s eye exam, he went out and memorized the eye charts. It didn’t matter which line he was asked to read because he had it memorized.

Because of his bad eyes he couldn’t go overseas and he ended up serving in California, where he did more than 300 training films for the Army.

He rose to the rank of captain and before he retired he was offered the rank of major. He turned the promotion down, saying he believed anyone with a rank that high should be able to serve overseas.

My father was always fond of the military and I learned that attitude from him as a little boy.

When he drove me out to the ranch in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he’d always sing the Army, Navy and Marine Corps hymns.

He’d sing the songs as a way to get me to ask him questions and then he’d tell me stories about the amazing things American soldiers and sailors did at Pearl Harbor or on D-Day, or at Midway or the Battle of the Bulge.

Most young people today don’t know those stories and few have even heard of the battles where they took place.

And they also don’t understand how much the people of France and other places in the world truly love us for what our fathers and grandfathers did for them. All you have to do is travel to those places to find out.

A big problem today is that too many Americans have forgotten to love ourselves for what we are and for what we’ve done for the world.

We know America is not perfect – and never has been.

But the media, the progressive politicians and the hate-America crowd seem to be focusing today only on our flaws and our warts and our other imperfect parts.

We need to remember to love America for all the good things our men and women in the military have done for the world. Especially on Memorial Day and the anniversary of D-Day.

–

Copyright 2021 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

Facebook decided this week it’s no longer “misinformation” to wonder whether COVID-19 was manmade by Chinese scientists in a biolab in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But it’s not just Facebook. The national media and President Biden have just done a similar 180.

On Wednesday, the same guy who had ordered the shutting down of the Trump administration’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19 told the U.S. intelligence community to redouble its efforts to find out how the coronavirus got started.

So, faster than you can say “dishonest mainstream media,” the idea that a deadly manmade virus came from a biolab in Communist China flipped from being a racist Trump conspiracy theory to a credible and probable possibility.

All last year the liberal media and our top scientists told us over and over that we had to believe the Communist Chinese fairy tale that COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans.

But that story has recently fallen apart after reports that several researchers working on coronaviruses at the biolab in Wuhan got so sick in November 2019 they were hospitalized.

Everyone in the national media is now talking about the plausibility of an escaped coronavirus as if it’s something new.

That’s great.

But if you go back a year, and if you know how to connect some dots, you would have known that there’s been something sloppy and rotten in China’s biolabs for almost 20 years.

In 2004 China’s health officials reported that four suspected cases of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) – which sickened 8,000 in 29 countries and killed nearly 800 in 2003-2004 – were the result of a safety breach at a Beijing biolab studying the SARS coronavirus.

In 2017, after years of searching in caves, a team of scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology found the source of SARS in the bodies of horseshoe bats.

They began studying – and manipulating — the deadly and risky bat coronavirus in their high-containment laboratory, which in 2015 had become China’s first biolab to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4).

The trouble was, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s biolab was a pandemic waiting to get started.

In 2018 a group of U.S. diplomats and scientists who visited the lab told the Trump administration that its staff was not properly trained and was not following the protocols to safely operate a level 4 biolab.

The White House was actually warned that the Wuhan lab’s “work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”

Biden appears to be catching up to the reality of China’s third-rate biolabs now, but he’s always known better.

It was the Obama administration that in 2015 helped China get the international OK it needed to raise the Wuhan lab’s rating from level 3 to 4.

By getting a higher accreditation, the biolab was allowed to handle the deadliest, riskiest viruses from anywhere in the world.

It also gave it the ability to do the testing and manipulation of coronaviruses that gave it the potential to become a biological weapons facility.

But don’t blame Obama, Biden or Dr. Fauci for endorsing the Wuhan biolab’s upgrade. The whole world signed off on it.

Maybe that’s why no other governments are coming down hard on China.

Maybe they don’t want to jeopardize their zillion-dollar financial arrangements with China or risk their domestic companies’ access to China’s 1.4 billion potential customers.

It’s not just the NBA, Apple or Hollywood that have sold their souls to China’s Communist government for profit.

That’s actually the big story, I think. Money. If you follow the money, you usually get to the bottom of things.

In this case, when you get to the bottom of things the world population will find out that their governments approved a level 4 biolab that can produce biological weapons for China—the world’s number one enemy of freedom.

And so far, 3.4 million human beings have died because of it.

–

Copyright 2021 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

China is claiming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “full of lies and disinformation.”

That’s not necessarily untrue most of the time.

But in this case Pelosi is being blasted by Communist China’s loudest mouthpieces because she’s actually done the right thing – almost.

To protest China’s long list of serious human rights violations, which is a good thing, Pelosi has urged global leaders and diplomats to boycott the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February.

Nice try, Nancy.

But somehow, I don’t think China’s rulers will be losing sleep over your idea.

Their country is not going to look bad in the eyes of the world or lose the propaganda benefit of hosting the Olympics because Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and their global counterparts don’t show up in Beijing.

A boycott by a bunch of no-name diplomats will never persuade the Communist Party of China to release a million Uyghurs from its concentration camps, take its knee off the neck of Hong Kong or decide to transform its oppressed nation into East Switzerland.

She’d never suggest it, but what Pelosi should have proposed is for Olympic athletes in America and other free countries to protest China’s multiple crimes by staying home.

A well-publicized boycott staged by America’s elite athletes would have a great impact on China’s “good name” – and might even pressure it to free-up its 1.44 billion captive citizens a little.

I’m thinking specifically of the NBA, superstar role models like LeBron James and hundreds of other highly paid pro basketball and football players.

NBA players won’t be competing in the winter Olympics, obviously, but if they want to be consistent and principled, they need to man up and take a knee against China.

It will take a whole lot of courage. The NBA is a lucrative and extremely popular brand in China.

It makes tons of money selling its merchandise and streaming its games there. Players also derive part of their huge salaries from the league’s popularity in China.

Stars like Lebron James need to apply their high standards of justice and moral outrage to China. NBA players need to protest the bad things China’s authoritarian government have been doing to its own people – and the rest of us.

China gave the world the COVID-19 pandemic. It has colonized Tibet and threatens to annex Taiwan. It’s expanding its military presence in the Pacific.

China, to steal a phrase, is the Evil Empire of our day.

It needs to be publicly shamed and punished by the free world for its human rights violations, and the NBA and its players have the power to do both – if they can find the courage.

Many of the NBA’s players have spent the last few years taking a knee during the National Anthem to protest what they perceive to be America’s systemic racism and the mistreatment of blacks and other minorities by police.

Fine. That’s their right. Peaceful protest is part of what America is all about.

But while they’ve taken a knee for George Floyd and against America, the players just take the money from China.

They’ve turned a blind eye to the genocide of Muslims, the arrests and disappearances of its whistle-blowers and its crackdown on the people of Hong Kong – and just take the money from China.

The NBA and the players talk big about justice, but they’re all about the money. They’re not about to hurt their bottom lines by taking a knee against China.

You might say that when it comes to China the NBA and the players don’t go for the gold, they go for the green.

–

Copyright 2021 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

Most of the country has seen video of the tragic death of Ma’Khia Bryant.

She’s the 16-year-old girl from Columbus, Ohio, who was shot four times on April 20 by a police officer as she was about to stab another young woman with a kitchen knife.

Many people blame the cop for Ma’Khia’s death.

Many people blame Ma’Khia’s parents or Ma’Khia herself.

But you know what really killed her?

Foster care. That’s the failed system that turned her into a raging young woman with a knife in her hand.

Foster care in our country has been a scandalous failure for decades.

Though it’s supposed to save children from the neglect or abuse of their birth parents by placing them with state-certified foster parents or relatives, it often becomes a cruel form of child abuse itself.

The raw statistics are appalling.

Right now there are about 435,000 American children in foster care. Their median age is 6½ – which means there are as many kids under that age as there are above it.

About 20,000 foster kids will turn 17 or 18 and “age out” of foster care this year. Within two years many of them will be jobless.

Within four years, a quarter of the system’s annual “graduates” – 5,000 kids – will become involved in the criminal justice system.

Thousands of other angry, unloved and unskilled young adults each year end up homeless or are funneled into the sex trafficking business. And it’s estimated that half of the country’s homeless population has spent part of their lives in foster care.

Statistics say that foster children who are placed in five or more homes have a 90 percent chance of becoming involved in the criminal justice system. Mc’Khia, who entered the system as a teenager, was in five homes in two years.

Most people have no idea how the foster care system works or understand the damage it can do to young children when they are separated from the parents.

At age three or four, children have no way of knowing they are being abused. They can even confuse abuse with being loved.

When the county youth services people come and pull them out of their beds in the middle of the night, put them in the back of a car and take them to a strange home, they don’t know what’s going on.

They don’t know that they’re being helped or protected. They just know they’ve been taken away from everyone they love and everything they know.

Many children who get trapped in foster care when they are very young can end up being shuttled around to as many as 15 foster homes before they enter the adult world.

People look at Ma’Khia and say it was her own fault she died. But who really put that knife in her hand?

She wasn’t born angry. It was her parents and the foster care system that teamed up to create a girl so mad she wanted to kill someone.

–
Copyright 2021 Michael Reagan.
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.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Decades ago my sister Maureen often used to call the Republican Party “The Stupid Party.”

Today, the Party of Lincoln – the Party of Reagan – is again proving her right.

Instead of concentrating on retaking the House next year and regaining control of the Senate, the GOP is looking backwards and engaging in intra-party squabbles.

Instead of uniting to attack – and stop – President Biden’s plans to turn the U.S. into the United Socialist States of America, the GOP is still fighting over the results of the 2020 election.

The party’s leaders aren’t able to take advantage of Biden’s early blunders because of one man – Donald Trump.

By refusing to shut up about how he was cheated in 2020, and teasing everyone about whether he’ll run in 2024, Trump is not just splintering and distracting the Republican Party.

He’s also giving the lazy national media an excuse to focus on him every day, instead of covering the Biden-created crisis at the southern border and other Biden fiascos-in-the-making.

I agree with Rep. Liz Cheney when she says Trump has to get over Nov. 3.

He lost. It’s over. It’s history. He has to face it and stop branding it “The Big Lie.”

Given his ego and need to make headlines every day, I don’t think he’ll be able to shut up about the past and look to the future.

But Republicans in federal and state office have to stop buying in to “The Big Lie” to make Trump happy with them.

The best thing they can do is ignore Trump, forget about primaries, get unified and figure out how to win the general elections next year.

Republicans also have to figure out how to stay at the top of the news, talking about what our view of America is, what we are doing and how we’re going to do it – as a party.

We should leave Cheney in her position as House GOP conference chair, the No. 3 spot in the party. (It’s not like she’s a maverick. She voted with Trump 92 percent of the time.)

In any case, I don’t want a 100 percent party of conservative robots.

We are always going to have people on the fringes of the party who are going to agree or disagree on certain issues.

We can’t say if you don’t agree 100 percent with the Republican majority or the leadership we’re going to kick you out of the party.

Cheney simply got tired of Trump talking about Nov. 3.

She spoke out because she doesn’t want “The Big Lie” to be used against the party in the 2022 elections.

I’m tired of “The Big Lie” too. So are lots of other people.

Cheney wants the party to move on and work on winning back the House and Senate. So do I.

The GOP will never win back Congress or block the socialist visions of Biden if the focus continues to be about Donald Trump and his vision for America.

It’s got to be about the Republican Party’s vision, and it’s up to GOP leaders in Washington to lead – so please lead.

Trump can be a supporter of the party or even its leader, but he has to behave like a leader.

By teasing about running in 2024 or hinting that he’d choose Florida Gov. DeSantis as his VP, he’s hurting other Republicans.

He prevents other potential presidential candidates like DeSantis from fundraising and doing what they need to do to prepare for 2024.

Trump can make the party stronger if he does what my dad did and puts the party and the country above himself and works with others to get things done.

What Biden and the progressive Democrats are trying to pull off is a huge gift to Republicans. Biden is going to be Jimmy Carter 2.0.

But to take advantage of the mistakes of the power-hungry Democrats, the Party of Reagan has to stop being stupid and start being smart.

–
Copyright 2021 Michael Reagan.
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.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

It’s been a rough week for conservatives, Republicans and all Americans.

The torture started Sunday evening with the Academy Awards ceremony, which sounded like it was produced by the AOC/Stacey Abrams wing of the Democrat Party.

I say “sounded,” because I didn’t actually waste three hours of my life watching Hollywood millionaires patting themselves on their backs for their awesome talents and even more awesome woke politics.

As I’ve done in past years, I waited for the media highlight reels to find out who won what and which stars made the biggest fools of themselves.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to skip the latest episode of “Oscars Death Spiral.”

Fewer than 10 million Americans watched – the fewest ever and a far cry from 43 million viewers in 2014.

One of the big deals this year was that Chloe Zhao, a Chinese-born filmmaker, won the Best Director award for “Nomadland.”

What made it a such big deal, at least according to those who are fixated on race, was that Zhao was the first female person of color to win for directing.

“Person of color”? Really? I didn’t realize Chinese people have been officially designated as persons of color.

The hardcore movie masochists who watched the Oscars to the bitter end were shocked when Chadwick Boseman didn’t win for Best Actor.

The great actor who last fall tragically lost his battle with colon cancer at age 45 was expected to win for his secondary role in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

Instead, Anthony Hopkins – an old male person of the white color – won for playing the demented patriarch in “The Father.”

Hopkins was the right choice.

But apparently everyone in La-La Land had figured the fix was in for Boseman, the sympathetic choice, and his loss raised a few new charges of institutional racism in Hollywood.

Of course, if there were racists to blame, they were among the 9,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Speaking of phony theatrics and leftwing virtue signaling, on Wednesday night I watched President Biden give his speech to about 200 vaccinated, socially distanced and unnecessarily masked Congress-persons in the nearly empty Capitol.

I admit I didn’t last more than 45 minutes.

But whoever wrote the speech should be investigated by the Justice Department for theft of political property rights.

I swear President Biden – aka, FDR 2.0 – repeated every Democratic cliche, promise, platitude and excuse for more spending, more taxing and more Big Government programs that I’ve heard in the last 60 years.

He droned on and on, taking credit for winning the war on COVID, absurdly calling the Jan. 6 “insurrection” the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” and reciting the Bernie Sanders’ socialist playbook without any of Bernie’s passion or intensity.

His speech was almost as embarrassing as the masks that were plastered on the faces of Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi sitting behind him.

At times Biden raised his voice or whispered at us as if he was America’s grandmother in chief and we were all six-year-olds who believe the Democrat fairy-tale that federal money grows on trees.

He acted like we couldn’t survive to adulthood without the free government goodies that he and his progressive allies in Congress were going to dish out.

Trillions for families. Trillions for infrastructure and schools and federal freebies for all.

Free pre-K … free college … free elder care… free Instant Pots and Netflix subscriptions.

Make the rich pay their fair share. Make corporations pay higher taxes. Raise the national minimum wage to $15…

I stopped watching long before Biden started boasting how tough he was going to be on Putin and China.

But my son Cameron bravely hung in there for the entire 6,000-word ordeal.

By the time the president finished listing all the things he was going to have Big Government do for – and to – us to make America more like Europe, the only thing Cameron said he learned was that Biden would have supported Britain in the Revolutionary War.

So true, so true.

–
Copyright 2021 Michael Reagan.

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.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

So let me get this straight.

According to the president, according to the Democrats, and according to the liberal media, half my country is racist, my political party is racist and I’m a racist.

That’s the message they’ve all been telling me in the wake of the guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis cop charged with killing George Floyd.

They say because I’m white, I’m an accomplice in George Floyd’s death.

They say because I’m white, I’m guilty for creating a systemically racist country that deliberately keeps blacks in political and economic chains and allows police to mistreat and kill blacks without punishment.

They say because I’m a Republican who didn’t vote for Joe Biden, who doesn’t support Black Lives Matters and who doesn’t want to defund or dismantle the police, I’m a racist.

You know what I say about all this crap about racism being everywhere?

It’s a cynical political power play by Democrats that needs to end quickly before we get the race war they are hell-bent on starting.

I’m really sick of watching America being ripped in half over racism by so-called progressive Democrats and their shameless flacks and lackeys in the media.

Based on how the Biden-pampering media spin it, you’d think it was Republicans who founded the KKK and invented the Jim Crow South’s racist system of legal segregation that lasted for seven decades, not the racist Southern Democrats.

The same dishonest media would have you think it was the Republicans who filibustered things like the 1965 Civil Rights Bill, not racist Democrats like Robert Byrd, the “reformed” KKK local leader who a few years later would mentor and befriend a young Delaware senator named Joe Biden.

Speaking of Biden, with his racist legislative track record in the Senate, he has a lot of nerve scolding the country for being racist and blasting police for systematically mistreating Black Americans.

Biden, his media allies don’t want to remind you, was the law-and-order guy who took credit for passing the 1994 crime bill – the tough law that the New York Times says helped to create the era of mass incarceration of Blacks.

But that’s OK. Biden’s ancient sins against Blacks are forgotten. Now he’s a progressive.

Now he’s so woke he makes irresponsible public statements about what he’d like the verdict of a murder trial to be while the jury is deliberating, as he did in the Chauvin case.

Virtually no one in the country objected to the guilty Chauvin verdict – except the same people who demanded it before any of the facts were heard.

As we’ve seen since Tuesday, convicting a bad cop and putting him in prison for his wrongdoing will not be enough to satisfy the BLM crowd and their Democrat allies.

They want all cops everywhere to suffer for Chauvin’s sins.

They want the country’s police to be defunded, disarmed and replaced with social workers and EMTs or they’ll protest – and riot – in the streets until they get their way.

They’re so insane that now they’re saying they don’t want cops to intervene in knife fights like the one in Columbus that ended with a white cop shooting to death a 16-year-old black girl who was about to stab another black girl.

Of course, it’s easy for politicians and celebrities to say we should take your cops off the street when they will always have their own armed protection.

Meanwhile, by pushing the sick narrative that white cops go to work each day hoping to kill a black man, Democrats and the media have succeeded in smearing all white cops as racist murderers.

It’s no wonder cops are quitting all over the country, from New York City to New Mexico to Los Angeles.

Crime and violence are on the rise in our cities because half the country is so stupid they believe the Democrats’ lies about systemic racism in our justice system and an ongoing war on blacks by racist cops.

If the other half of the country – the Republican half – doesn’t stand up to the Democrats soon, it’s going to be too late for Americans of every color.

–
Copyright 2021 Michael Reagan.
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.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

My wife, daughter and I usually drive over to Las Vegas two or three times a year.

We don’t go to gamble. We go for three things – the concerts, the dinners and the pools.

Concerts and most of the shows have yet to return in full force.

But otherwise, as we saw last week, Las Vegas has completely reopened.

Masks are still mandatory, even outside, and the “science” of mask wearing is as nuts as it is around the country.

You have to wear a mask when you enter a restaurant. But the moment you sit down you can take it off. Then a food server wearing a mask takes your order.

If you get up and go to the restroom, you have put your mask back on. Then you return to your table and can take off the mask.

It doesn’t make much sense to me – scientific or common.

Maybe Dr. Fauci can explain how the virus can’t get you when you are mask-less at your table.

Last week the mask theater at our hotel pool was even crazier.

The three of us have all been vaccinated. But sitting in our space by the pool in the burning sun, with no one within 15 or 20 feet of us, we still had to keep our masks on.

That mandate was enforced by the hotel’s mask police, who got paid $11 an hour to walk around in greenish T-shirts carrying a box of masks. If you didn’t have your own mask, they gave you one to put on.

Meanwhile, if we walked 10 feet to the pool and got in the water, we could take our masks off.

In the pool were 45 people we’ve never met, all mask-less.

A dozen stood in the pool for hours drinking, talking, laughing, and, by the way, never putting on their masks and climbing out to go to the bathroom.

So, based on my observations, am I to conclude there was no coronavirus swimming in the pool, but if I was just three feet from the water without a mask I could catch it?

Even if I’m as fully vaccinated as President Biden’s dog? Dr. Fauci, are you still there?

We better learn to laugh at this irrational mask stuff, I guess, because we’re going to be wearing them for a long, long time.

The after-effects of the lockdowns were evident elsewhere in Vegas.

For instance, after we got dressed up to go out to eat dinner inside a good restaurant – something you still can’t do in Los Angeles – we went to the hotel front door to catch a cab.

But there was no cab.

Instead of the usual line of 20 taxis waiting for riders, there was a line of 20 riders waiting for a cab, one of which would show up every three or four minutes.

It was the same inconvenient story after we ate at Ferraro’s Italian Restaurant & Wine Bar. At 10 p.m. on a Friday night there were no cabs and the closest Uber was 45 minutes away.

When the owner of Ferraro’s saw us waiting, he gave us a lift back to our hotel.

On the way he explained that a huge percentage of taxi and Uber drivers – like their counterparts in other cities – initially had stopped driving last spring because 90 percent of their business was crushed by the lockdowns.

But they are still not driving because they are being paid upwards of a $1,000 a week in state and federal unemployment benefits for not working.

I don’t blame the drivers.

When I was very young my father told me what his father had told him back in the 1920s — “Son, when the government starts paying you not to work, why work?”

When the government stops paying them so well, those off-duty Uber drivers sitting by the pool with me last week will go back to work and life will return a little closer to what passes for normal in “The City of Lost Wages.”

–

Copyright 2021 Michael Reagan.

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.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Will someone please lend President Biden a history book?

He thinks Georgia’s new voting integrity law is “Jim Crow on steroids.”

And Georgia’s pretend ex-governor Stacey Abrams says it’s “Jim Crow redux in a suit and tie.”

Really?

Come on, you guys. You’ve been watching too much CNN and MSNBC.

The crimes against equal voting rights that are allegedly being committed by Republican state lawmakers in Georgia and other Red states to suppress black votes are nothing like what occurred in the “Old Jim Crow.”

It doesn’t matter how many times it’s repeated by Biden, Abrams or the mob of liberal pundits and TV journalists.

Requiring an ID for absentee voters is not really racist. It’s not “Jim Crow 2.0.” It’s not a modern form of voter repression or intimidation.

Neither is it racist to prohibit campaign operatives from giving water or other snacks to voters waiting in line at polling places or asking early voters to get their votes in, um, earlier.

Calling the new voting law in Georgia a sign of the “New Jim Crow” is not just showing your ignorance of history and committing a gross and misleading exaggeration for partisan political reasons.

It also diminishes and cheapens the shameful awfulness of the un-American, unconstitutional and dehumanizing reality of the “Old Jim Crow.”

The original Jim Crow – in case you’ve forgotten or were never taught – was America’s 70-year regional “experiment” in apartheid.

From about 1890 to 1965, the Democrats controlling 17 one-party states below the Mason-Dixon Line created and perpetuated a separate, unequal and parallel black society.

They used the force of local and state law to oppress and humiliate blacks every day and prevent them from interacting with whites in public and private spaces – in schools, buses and even elevators.

When it came to elections, the white supremacists who ruled the Jim Crow South didn’t mess around.

They openly used violence, intimidation and any devious government means necessary to systematically prevent millions of blacks in the South from voting or even registering.

The web site of the American Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee has a shocking list of the brutal tactics regularly used by the white people in charge of the “Old Jim Crow” to preserve their power and keep blacks (and poor whites) from voting.

Violence was common. Blacks who tried to vote or even register were threatened, beaten, and killed. Their families were also harmed and sometimes their homes were burned.

There were literacy tests, property tests, poll taxes and frequent purges of the voting rolls. Former prisoners – who were disproportionately black – were not allowed to vote.

Most important, blacks who were brave enough to risk voting couldn’t vote in all-white Democrat primaries – the only elections that really mattered in the South when there were so few Republican voters.

The “Old Jim Crow” era of legalized segregation is said to have ended in 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed and blacks in the South could vote without fear.

The American Black Holocaust Museum does a good job of showing how unjust, unequal and demeaning every aspect of life was for blacks in the “Old Jim Crow.”

But unfortunately, it agrees with liberal black activists like Abrams and the Democrat Party that today’s voting laws and customs still “make it difficult or impossible for many black citizens and other minorities to vote.”

The museum thinks felons should be able to vote and complains that black and Latino voters are often still unfairly purged from voter rolls.

It also has a convoluted explanation for why the bureaucratic process of getting government-issued IDs is like a poll tax that discriminates against poor, black, brown and old people.

But at least the American Black Holocaust Museum has the good sense not to claim that the “New Jim Crow” so many Democrats see in every corner of America today is anything close to the “Old Jim Crow” on steroids.

–
Copyright 2021 Michael Reagan.
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.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

The Pandemic of 2020 was a tragedy for the whole world.

But our all-out war against the coronavirus taught Americans a bunch of important lessons.

It proved that our political system in Washington is a partisan train wreck.

It proved that you can’t teach kids by Zoom as well as you can in person.

It proved that the CDC doesn’t know what it’s doing and Blue State governors will issue sweeping lockdowns even when they have no idea how much collateral harm they’ll do to the rest of society.

And on a much, much lighter note – and as a way to mark Opening Day of the 2021 Major League Baseball season – the pandemic proved to us that America’s former national past-time doesn’t need a 162-game season.

Last year, because of lockdowns, teams played only 60 fan-free games, but the shorter season was probably good for everybody except ushers, vendors and betting parlors.

I’m not the first baseball fan who watches the Weather Channel regularly to point out that starting the season in April and ending it in November in North America is crazy.

For instance, on Thursday in Chicago the Cubs and Pirates started their opener at 2:30 p.m. with the temperature at 34 and a wind chill in the low 20s.

The game slogged on for nearly four hours and the Pirates won. No word yet on survivors.

The toll of frostbitten fans was held down only by Mayor Lightfoot’s determination that “her” city’s current COVID-19 statistics allowed 20 percent capacity at Wrigley Field.

In other words, instead of 41,374 shivering baseball nuts in Wrigley there were 8,274 – wearing masks when not eating or drinking hot chocolate and bunched together for about three hours in pods of four or less.

In Pittsburgh, where it snowed on Thursday, the governor of Pennsylvania has kindly allowed the Pirates to fill PNC Park to 50 percent capacity for their home opener next week – about 19,000 fans (roughly the 2019 season attendance average).

Other stadium capacities are all over the lot: 25 percent in Miami, 20 percent in Yankee Stadium and just 12 percent in Boston.

In the still great state of Texas, the capacity at the Rangers’ Globe Life Field was set at 100 percent, a figure that made a nerdy writer at the New York Times gulp in fear and loathing.

Baseball is a great game, and I’m glad it’s back. But it’s just not as much fun anymore.

The last time it was truly fun was in 1998 when Mark McGwire’s of the Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Cubs had their epic home run chase and both erased Roger Maris’ season record of 61 set in 1961.

McGwire ended up with 70 homers and Sosa 66 and the league promoted the heck out of the race.

Though it was tainted by McGwire’s admission that he used performance-enhancing drugs – “juices” that were legal at the time – it made baseball exciting, fun and something for fans to follow day by day.

Baseball was fun for Los Angeles fans last year when the Dodgers won the World Series, but the best part of the 2020 season was its shortness.

Now we’re back to 162 three-hour games that won’t start to mean anything for the best teams until September, when the fight for the playoffs gets serious.

I have friends who just paid $14,000 for four season tickets to the Dodgers. That means 81 long days and nights ahead at Dodger Stadium.

I don’t care how good L.A. is this year, you’ve got to be a certified baseball addict to endure that kind of overdose.

After last year’s shortened season, baseball probably needs a 162-game schedule this year to satisfy its hardcore fan base.

But except for the major market teams with deep pockets, most teams will be out of the pennant race by mid-May and for the rest of the year they’d be thrilled to see their ballparks even a third filled.

If those teams want to pretend they are bumping up against the COVID-19 capacity limits, they better keep about 10,000 of their cardboard cutout fans ready.

–
Copyright 2021 Michael Reagan.
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.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].