Cagle World

Spoiler alert.

The Democrats’ big dream of impeaching President Trump is going nowhere.

Act I of the pathetic Trump impeachment hearings they are staging in the House for the next week was not just an obvious sham, it was a political bust that is going to backfire badly on the Democrats.

There were no fireworks, no bombshells. Just boring-as-hell TV.

The president’s bigger-than-Nixon crime, claim the Democrats and liberal media, was an alleged quid-pro-quo deal that he tried to pull off with Ukrainian President Zelensky – what the deluded Democrats now prefer to call an act of “bribery” – for his own political gain.

The president’s fictitious deal involved withholding U.S military aid to Ukraine until Zelensky publicly investigated Hunter Biden, who became a highly paid board member of a corrupt Ukrainian gas company while his father Joe just happened to be in charge of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

It doesn’t matter to the Democrats that the U.S. military aid to Ukraine was not withheld, and that the investigation of the son of Trump’s potential 2020 political opponent by Zelensky’s government never happened.

Those important facts, like so many others, are irrelevant to serial liar Adam Schiff and his Housemates who are still desperately searching for an actual high crime to hang their fading Trump impeachment dream on.

The Democrats’ lead-off “star witnesses” on Wednesday were two supposedly nonpartisan State Department diplomats stationed in Ukraine.

CNN and most of the liberal media – who couldn’t stop calling them patriots – think the testimony of these bureaucrats proved beyond a doubt that Trump was close to being a war criminal.

But all we really got from the stuffy diplomatic duo were several hours of “he-said, they-said, I-heard-that, I-overhead-this” hearsay and complaints that their boss, President Trump, was not conducting foreign policy the way they wanted him to.

You’d never know it from the liberal media’s historical ignorance and biased coverage, but Trump isn’t the first president to have differences with his own state department or use non-state department personnel to perform foreign policy work.

State departments are staffed by career diplomats and bureaucrats who never leave, never seem to die and often end up working for many presidents of both parties.

All state department employees have their own opinions about what our foreign policy should or should not be, but their job is not to form it or even like it.

Their job is basically to shut up and implement the foreign policy of whatever president is elected.

For good and bad, that’s how it works and always has – the president is the chief executive and gets the final say when it comes to foreign policy.

For example, in 1983, when my father was president, the Organization of American States asked him if he’d send U.S. troops to Grenada to free the hostages there.

My dad called a group of nine others into the Oval Office to discuss the idea. The Senate, the House, the intelligence community and the State Department were all represented.

After discussing what the U.S. should do, if anything, the group decided to put it to a vote.

As my father later told me, the vote was 7-3 not to intervene in Grenada. But 48 hours later what happened? We were in Grenada.

One of the senators who had been at the meeting reached out the next day to my father.

“Mr. President,” he said. “We voted 7-3 not to go into Grenada. You were part of the three, not part of the seven. You lost the vote.”

“Yes, that’s right,” my dad said. “But I’m the president of the United States and my one vote trumps your seven.”

When it comes to foreign policy, the president – whoever he is – can always trump the vote of the secretary of state, the ambassador to China or a third- or fourth-level bureaucrat.

This week we saw two unelected career diplomats testifying against the president in an impeachment proceeding.

Neither of them had any firsthand information about what President Trump said to President Zelensky.

All they had were their opinions and complaints about the direction or back-channel operations of Trump’s foreign policy.

Sorry gents, your “votes” don’t count. What counts is winning presidential elections.

And if the rest of the House’s impeachment hearings are as embarrassing as Wednesday’s, the Democrats will make sure they won’t win the next one.

–
Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].

If you’re a young child trapped in our infamous foster care system, your future is bleak.

It’s likely that you’ll bounce around to more than a dozen foster homes until you “age out” at 18 and are allowed to live on your own.

Then, within two years, there’s a six in 10 chance you’ll be living on the street, in jail or involved in sex trafficking.

Being adopted by a loving family is the miracle any foster child hopes and prays for.

But chances of that happening are tragically low.

Only about 110,000 of the 400,000 children in government foster care are even eligible to be adopted.

And now, thanks to a federal rule change proposed last week by the Trump administration, even fewer kids are likely to get the chance to escape from the cruel prison of foster care.

The rule change would remove language in funding grants from the Department of Health and Human Services that protect LGBTQ and other prospective parents from discrimination when they seek to adopt or foster children.

The rule is being pushed by evangelical Christians, who in their exalted opinion don’t think gay or lesbian couples should be allowed to foster or adopt children.

It’s very sad. It used to be that Christian churches were in the forefront on adoption.

According to the research, compared to the general population practicing Christians are more than twice as likely to adopt. Catholics are three times as likely and evangelicals five times as likely.

Maybe that eagerness to open their hearts and homes to unloved children has something to do with James 1:27 – “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: take care of orphans and widows in their affliction, and keep oneself unstained from the world.”

If evangelical Christian churches are so gung ho about wanting their political hero President Trump to write laws making it impossible or more difficult for LGBTQ families to adopt children from our foster care system, I have some advice for their pastors.

It’s incumbent on you and your congregations to pick up the slack and start adopting as many of those 110,000 foster children as fast as you can.

If you’re not willing to put your professed love for the children of God into practice in the real world, then don’t prevent others from doing a good thing.

Any foster child is much better off being adopted by Rosie O’Donnell and her partner, or any other loving gay or lesbian couple, than remaining in a system infamous for fostering the physical and mental abuse of children.

The churches like to say they really care about the children and that Jesus really cares about the children. Well, if they really believed that, they wouldn’t let 110,000 children languish in foster care.

If they really cared about Jesus’ children, they’d push for laws to make sure as many people as possible can adopt them.

This issue is particularly sad for me. I never had to experience the abuses of the foster care system because I was adopted by a loving couple from Hollywood.

But as I say in my book “Twice Adopted,” until you stop looking at abuse through the eyes of an adult and start looking at it through the eyes of a child you can never understand it.

Which of us adult Christians would go up to a foster child of 8 and say, “There’s a nice couple who would like to adopt you and take you home, love you, raise you well, see that you are well educated and prepare you for a successful life.

“But the problem is, they are gay, so we’re going to keep you here.”

What would that child choose if it were up to him – ten more years of cold foster care or being adopted by a loving gay couple?

I know what the kid would say. And all good Christians should agree with him.

–

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].

Tens of thousands of acres scorched by unstoppable wildfires.

Thousands of people evacuated from their homes near San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Electricity shut off to millions to prevent hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds from downing transmission wires and starting new fires.

Wildfire season in California makes headlines every year, but it’s nothing unnatural and nothing new.

It’s been a cruel fact of nature up and down the once Golden State since before I was born.

When I was growing up my father had a ranch near Malibu. We had some wildfires out there, but what got burned were barns, stables and lots of grass and bushes.

But around the 1970s the building boom came and tens of thousands of people moved into places like West Lake Village and the Simi Valley, where a grassfire threatened the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library earlier this week.

So today, what gets burned down in wildfire season isn’t just a barn or two – it’s peoples’ expensive homes.

It’s a recurring tragedy. I feel terrible for the people who lose their homes in wildfires.

Everyone likes to blame the recent wildfires on Pacific Gas & Electric, the private gas-and-electric utility that has the monopoly to provide power to the central and northern parts of the state.

PG&E is plenty guilty.

Its downed power lines and exploding transformers have started several major fires, including the destructive and deadly Camp Fire last year north of San Francisco, which is why the company has declared bankruptcy.

PG&E’s got billions in legal claims to pay off, which is why the state gave it permission to raise its electricity rates, though they are already some of the highest in the U.S.

Like most regulated monopolies that are protected for decades by government from competition, PG&E is a poorly run, inefficient and antiquated company that charges customers higher and higher prices and provides lousier and lousier service.

What’s worse, the company has been forced by the Democrats who run this one-party state to do a lot of really dumb things for environmental or politically correct reasons.

Instead of, say, spending the money to put powerlines underground decades ago or upgrading its transmission equipment, the company has had to blow billions on solar panels and other forms of green energy.

Other green policies mandated by the state have prevented PG&E from clearing enough trees and brush away from their powerlines to prevent fires.

Meanwhile, poor forestry management by governments has left gigantic amounts of wood and undergrowth that make wildfires bigger, more destructive and impossible to control.

Because the state has given PG&E and smaller power companies monopolies over their regions, energy consumers like me get screwed again and again.

Unlike lucky citizens living in more sensible states like Pennsylvania, we have no energy choices. We pay whatever the monopolies and their political friends in Sacramento tell us we have to pay.

Keeping the electricity, gas and water on in my 4,300-square-foot house in the San Fernando Valley, for example, costs me about $1,500 a month – the same as my mortgage.

About $400 of my bill goes to underwrite the cost of water and power for those who can’t afford to pay for their own.

California, which has been putting the Green New Deal into practice long before AOC thought of it, is becoming like a Third World country.

Thanks to our idiotic politicians, we have tens of thousands of homeless people and drug users living in tents on the streets of our beautiful cities.

We can’t manage or market our water supply fairly or sensibly. We can’t produce energy that’s affordable, reliable or safe.

And after all these years we still can’t prevent wildfires from burning down our homes.

–

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].

President Trump says he wants to get our troops out of the “blood-stained sand” of the Middle East.

Most sane Americans would agree with that goal and hope he’s successful.

Unfortunately, the people in charge of our foreign policy are not sane, as they proved after Trump yanked a few dozen U.S. soldiers out of Northern Syria.

Trump’s sensible decision to let the Turks, Syrians and Russians figure out how to police their own backyards without our help brought him strong criticism from every political side.

Democrats and the liberal media’s pundits railed against it, but so what? They’re automatically against anything Trump does.

The president also got heavy bipartisan grief for allegedly betraying the Kurds, our trusted and state-less allies who lost 11,000 of their soldiers while helping us and Syrian democratic rebel forces defeat Isis.

Retired military leaders – many of the same ones who’ve been mismanaging our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 – and the neoconservative hawks in the Republican Party blasted Trump.

They said what he did was a naïve, stupid, irresponsible move that will empower Russia and make other countries distrust America’s word and its will.

As usual, the professional interventionists in Washington whom Democrat congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard calls “warmongers” are predicting that many terrible things will happen in Syria without American soldiers present to keep the peace.

Isis supposedly will regain its strength. The Kurds living in northern Syria – the ones Turkey considers terrorists – will suffer greatly.

Plus, our troop withdrawal will supposedly spark new fighting between the countries, kingdoms, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, tribes and street gangs that have been slaughtering each other in the Middle East for at least 3,000 years.

It’s hard to take this week’s hysteria about Trump’s decision seriously, especially when it comes from the Democrats and the liberal media who watched quietly as Barrack Obama and his team made bloody messes of Libya and Syria and mismanaged our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for eight years.

It’s been clear for many decades that America will never fix what’s wrong with the Middle East.

About 20 years ago I asked Col. David Hackworth, one of the country’s most decorated soldiers and an expert on warfare and the structure of the U.S. military, “When will there be peace in the Middle East?”

“When they’re all dead,” was his answer.

What did he think America’s policy should be in the Middle East?

We should arm everyone to the teeth, build a 100-foot wall around the region, go away and wait till everyone there kills each other.

“Hack,” who died in 2005, was not kidding.

Based on ancient and modern history, it was easy for him to predict what the Middle East would look like today – a perpetual war zone ruled by brutal dictators and Muslim extremists and crawling with lunatic terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda and Isis.

Trump claims pulling U.S. soldiers from Syria and letting the Russians sort things out between the Kurds and the Turks will bring peace in the long run.

He obviously has no idea what will actually happen. But no one else in Washington does, either.

Our military doesn’t know. Our state department doesn’t know. Lindsay Graham doesn’t know. Neither do Liz, Joe and Bernie and their anonymous foreign policy experts.

So far, the blood and treasure America has spent trying to bring peace, democracy and prosperity to the political chaos and religious madness of the Middle East has been tragically wasted.

Col. Hackworth believed fighting and making war is part of the Middle East’s DNA and America can do nothing with our military or economic power to change that.

President Trump seems to believe that too.

In any case, whatever he has done or not done correctly in a small corner of Syria won’t matter in the long run. The Middle East will be a bloody and uncivilized part of the world for another hundred years, at least.

–

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].

Twelve presidential wannabes standing in a row on stage for three hours.

Three friendly liberal journalists under-handing softball questions to them.

Tons of BS about free government healthcare and why Trump should be impeached.

Until the personal shock I got at the end of the Democrats’ debate on CNN woke me from my stupor, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t watching a rerun of last month’s debate.

It was the same uninspiring lineup of leftwing political featherweights, plus a self-made billionaire in a hideous tie named Tom Steyer.

And this time instead of ganging up on poor old Joe Biden, everyone was picking a fight with Elizabeth Warren.

They were trying to get the former Native American to admit the truth she would not speak – that her “free” Medicare-for-All Plan is going to be paid for with higher taxes on the middle class.

Otherwise, the CNN debate was another in a series of three-hour ordeals featuring the usual Trump bashing, false promises, canned answers and left-wing Democrat talking points.

No one excelled. No one stood out from the 12-pack of mediocrity.

Joe Biden was sad to watch as he continued his slow death spiral.

Bernie looked healthy, but he’s stalled in the polls. The angry socialist will never win the nomination, even with the endorsement of AOC and the rest of her Squad.

Sen. Warren was her usual unlikable self – a Professor Know-It-All with dozens of big detailed federal plans that won’t work, will cost trillions and will turn America into a bigger Swedish welfare state than it already is.

She also showed she’s not too good at taking a punch – or a bunch of slaps – from her fellow lefties.

Mayor Pete did well because in a crowd of goofballs he actually sounded reasonable now and then.

He and impressive congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii were standouts, but they have no more chance of winning the right to lose to Trump than Harris, O’Rourke, Booker and the rest of the 2 per-centers.

As for the debate itself, what a joke.

CNN’s questioners were too biased to ask tough questions of their soulmates.

Plus, they completely avoided several radioactive subjects that would have forced Democrats to admit that President Trump has some successes he can take credit for, such as the booming economy, low unemployment and trade negotiations with China.

Stranger yet, there wasn’t a single question about the hottest news topic of the moment – China and its tiff with the NBA.

Maybe CNN was afraid China would black out its newscasts like they did the NBA games.

If I were really cynical, I’d suspect CNN of clearing its debate questions beforehand with the Democratic National Committee.

The result of CNN’s institutional incompetence and permanent liberal tilt was a debate that slogged on and on and got nowhere. No wonder the ratings tanked.

If I were CNN’s execs, next time I’d put a BS Meter at the bottom of the screen. Watching its arrow spike twice a minute at least would have provided a little fun for intrepid viewers like me who stuck it out for three hours.

How bad was the Democrats’ third debate? Well, the biggest winner of the night again was obviously President Trump, who’s still the front-runner.

In what has to be the strangest twist of all, the most-Googled name of the night after the debate was not Biden, Sanders, Warren or Gabbard. It was not even a Democrat.

It was a Reagan.

My brother Ron ended up being the most Googled thanks to the old commercial that CNN ran right before the final question.

The TV ad, shot about six years ago, featured Ron saying something like, “I’m a lifelong atheist and I’m not worried about burning in hell.”

The sudden appearance of my brother endorsing atheism on my TV was shocking, to say the least.

Maybe it was the only ad CNN could find, or maybe CNN aired it for free.

But for me it was a crummy reward for watching their horrible debate all the way to the end.

–

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].

A Jeb Bush tweet this week got me thinking about some of the ways our nasty partisan politics has been hurting our kids.

Paraphrasing Jeb, he asked, “How can parents teach their children that using bad language is wrong when we have a president and members of Congress who constantly use profanity to talk about each other?”

Jeb’s tweet also reminded me of something a wise Sunday school teacher of mine said once: “There are more things ‘caught’ than ‘taught.’ ”

I often quote that line when I’m invited to speak to parents, and I thought about it again on Wednesday when I took some kids on a tour of my dad’s library in Simi Valley.

It was nice to go to the Reagan Library and be reminded of the positive attitude my father had about politics, his political opponents and people in general.

On my father’s tomb, for example, is the message, “I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.”

I don’t know how many of the kids I was with the other day were equipped to catch that optimistic message.

It’s really sad that they’re growing up in such a hateful political and cultural environment that has so little room for tolerance or civil debate.

Even a beloved liberal comedian like Ellen DeGeneres can get blasted by the Hollywood left just for sitting with her friend George W. Bush at a football game.

What happened to DeGeneres is a sign of how stupid and low our nasty partisan politics are.

Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, you can’t be seen in public with someone from the other political tribe without catching hell or hate from your own tribe.

Those kids I was with at the library were too young to know it, but there was a time before Twitter, Facebook and 1,000 cable TV channels when the most powerful people in politics could disagree vehemently yet still be civil to each other.

One of the most famous examples of that political civility and mutual respect was the relationship my father had with the Democrat Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill.

Not as well-known was the time my father was asked in 1985 to give a fundraising speech for the John F. Kennedy Library.

In 1960 my father had campaigned hard against JFK. But when he was President and he was asked by John and Caroline Kennedy to help them kick off an endowment drive for the JFK Library, he did it graciously and enthusiastically.

Praising JFK for being, among many other things, “a patriot” who had “a good hard, un-illusioned understanding of man and his political choices,” my father admitted he had not supported Kennedy for president.

“But you know,” he said, “it’s true: when the battle’s over and the ground is cooled, well, it’s then that you see the opposing general’s valor.”

That kind of civility being shown to a political opponent could never happen today in Washington, where Democrats and Republicans hate each other, call each other bad names and refuse to cooperate or compromise.

As for our kids today, they’re being taught by the bad example of adults to hate the political tribe they don’t belong to. It’s reinforced24/7 on TV, in social media and college campuses.

If we’re not careful we’re going to end up like Israel, where the Palestinian kids and the Israeli kids don’t play with each other and are raised from infancy to hate each other.

Maybe there’s still time for our children to turn to their parents and tell them it’s time for them to grow up and stop hating.

–

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].

California politicians are up to their stupid legislative tricks again.

This time, the state Assembly has passed a law that says students from kindergarten to eighth grade can’t be suspended for “willful defiance.”

Senate Bill 419 will soon make it illegal for public and charter schools to suspend a student who disrupts school activities or otherwise “refuses to follow the valid authority of school personnel.”

For example, if a sixth grader refuses to take off his hoodie in a classroom, it’s defined as “willful defiance.”

The good news, I guess, is that under the bill, students can still be suspended for violence or bringing a weapon or illegal drugs to school.

California schools were already prohibited from suspending kids in kindergarten through third grade, which, given their young ages, made a certain amount of sense.

But the new bill extends the suspension ban to eighth graders, and, if I know California, and I do, it won’t be long before the suspension ban is extended to high schoolers who steal cars or deal heroin.

Believe it or not, California is not a pioneer in going soft on trouble-making school kids. The feds were.

Just ask Andrew Pollack, the father of Meadow Pollack, who was killed in the horrible Parkland, Fla., high school shooting last year that claimed 17 innocent lives.

Pollack’s new book – which you will see featured on Fox News but not CNN – is titled “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies that Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students.”

As Pollack and his co-writer Max Eden found out after the Feb. 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, everyone who worked at the school (including the janitor) knew the killer was a strange, gun-obsessed, hate-filled, stressed-out, mentally troubled kid from an early age.

While he was still in middle school, his therapist and the school psychiatrist knew that he was having dreams of killing people and being covered in blood.

One of his eighth-grade teachers wrote the future mass-murderer was “a danger to the students and faculty at this school.”

This was a kid who had to be frisked every time went into the high school.

This was someone who after a teacher said to him “You’re really a good kid” said, “No I’m not. I’m really bad. I want to kill people.”

This was a kid whose house was called upon dozens of times by Broward County police, starting at age nine.

This was a kid who threatened his fellow students and scared his neighbors, one of whom in 2016 warned on Instagram that he “planned to shoot up the school” two years before he did it.

In other words, school administrators and local cops knew for years that the future killer was a disturbed and potentially dangerous person, but never expelled him or filed any official charges against him.

Pollack says that the soft-on-troublemakers policy implemented in Broward County schools was a direct result of the one pushed by President Obama’s department of education.

It was part of Obama’s attempt to end the “school-to-prison pipeline” by having schools not report various misdemeanors, including assault, committed by students to the authorities.

Instead, students were to be disciplined in-school by participating in healing circles, obstacle courses and other self-esteem building exercises that don’t work too well on future mass killers.

In interviews this week, Pollack said he believes it was the system that killed his daughter, not a gun.

Because school and police officials did not press charges against an obviously demented and violent teenager, he had a clean record and there were no red flags raised to stop the purchase of the weapon he used to kill 17 people with.

Pollack has decided to devote his life to making schools safer and to make sure the mistakes made in Broward County by school and police officials do not happen again.

In California, the politicians are doing their best to make his mission even more difficult.

–
Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].

We got used to his serial gaffes long ago.

“That’s just Joe,” his friends and supporters say about his latest gaffes today.

I’m not one to make fun of him by calling him “Sleepy Joe” or any of his other nicknames, but now I’m starting to feel sorry for Biden.

He’s showing signs of mental confusion. And he’s looking and acting way too old for his political aspirations.

If I could talk to Biden, I’d tell him the truth everyone knows but doesn’t have the heart to say out loud:

“Joe, face reality. It’s time to get off the stage. You don’t need any more of this campaign crap. It’s time to quit while more people still love you than feel sorry for you. While you still have a little dignity left. While you still have time to spend with your family.”

Biden knows the score better than any pundit or fake journalist you’ve seen on TV.

He knows he’s too old and too out of touch to run. But he won’t admit it. He’s hanging on, pretending he has a political future when all he has is a past.

It’s only because of his name recognition that Biden is still leading in the polls, basically doubling up on the numbers of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

But Biden is kidding himself if he thinks he can win the primary and defeat Trump next year.

In today’s new leftward sliding Democrat Party, he’s a living relic, another over-the-hill D.C. lifer with stale ideas pretending to be “woke” and carrying too much politically incorrect baggage from yesteryear.

Biden’s popularity in his own party peaked months ago and can only go downhill from here.

When the dozen Green New Dealers running for president start dropping by the wayside, their leftwing supporters are not going to all jump on the Biden Bandwagon. They’ll sign on with Warren or Sanders.

What Biden is doing is re-running the Hillary Clinton campaign – only four years later.

It’s not working for him, either.

He still thinks that he’ll take the White House next fall by repeating the campaign slogan “I may be too old. I may be too moderate. I may be boring. But only I can beat Trump.”

That might have worked for him in 2016, but we’ll never know because he deferred to President Obama’s wishes and the Clinton Machine.

Now Biden’s running a hapless, desperate, half-hearted campaign that’s become more like a personal sob-story tour.

In Iowa he’s been doing what he wouldn’t have done four years ago – using the death of his wife and daughter in a 1972 traffic accident as a way to talk about the importance of free health care for all.

So what should poor Joe do?

If I were advising him, I’d tell him to do exactly what Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck did just this week – retire.

Luck shocked the pro football world this week by calling a press conference and saying he had decided to quit the game he loved – at 29.

Luck explained that after seven years in the NFL, he was too physically beat up and mentally worn out to go on.

Biden doesn’t have $50 million to live on like Luck does. But he does have the $15 million he’s reportedly made since he left the Obama administration.

That booty and a dozen speeches a year ought to be enough to keep Biden and his loved ones from having to move into a sidewalk tent in Los Angeles.

So what should Biden do?

Does he want to leave the national political playing field as a successful VP or as a failed presidential candidate?

Does he drop out of the race on his own or risk embarrassing himself so much he’s pushed out.

If I were him, I’d call Andrew Luck for guidance.

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Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].

In the early 1970s California was America’s Nirvana.

It was a sunny, well-run, happy and free-spirited place of limitless opportunity where half the young people in Flyover Country wanted to move to, enjoy and spend the rest of their lives.

At the time, California’s government was a model for every other state. Its infrastructure, educational system and growing economy were top notch.

But that was a long, long political time ago.

Since then, the California Dream has been transformed into the California Nightmare by Democrats and their liberal ways. Now the Golden State is famous for high taxes, over-spending, failed education policies, overgenerous social welfare programs, a huge homeless population and bad environmental and energy rules.

In other words, today California is a social, fiscal and economic s-hole.

Young people and even middle-class people can no longer afford a house or apartment in cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco unless they want to live in a commune or in a tent on a filthy downtown sidewalk.

The only demographic that can still afford to live comfortably in California these days are Internet millionaires and rich Hollywood celebrities.

Thanks to their famous leftwing politics and their money, they’ve made California into a drive-through ATM for the Democrat Party.

Every Democrat running for president comes out to La-La Land for a fundraiser, grabs their money, leaves ASAP on a red-eye and pretends they don’t see what a wreck their pet ideas have made of California.

Presidential wannabes Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker were here just this week, holding “I hate Trump” fundraisers, appearing at town meetings to promise what they’re going to do about guns and violence and calling everyone in the Republican Party a racist.

Not one of them brought up the California’s horrible broken educational system and how it harms kids, especially poor black and Latino kids.

Neither African-American candidate boasted about what they’d do about the fact that 75 percent of black kids in California are unable to read, write or do math at their grade level.

Or that the only thing too many black and brown kids are qualified to do when they get out of the state’s public schools is to steal a gun and join a gang and start using it.

To be fair, public schools have been failing poor kids for decades in every major city of America.And both parties have failed to address the issue.

But if Harris and Booker are serious about fixing public education’s ongoing failures, which I don’t think they are, it’s going to take much more than repeating their party’s standard solution – pouring more money into schools and the pockets of the teachers unions.

Offering more school choice to the parents of black and brown children and opening more charter schools would be a start, but Democrats will never go there because they are too fond of the teachers unions and their political donations.

It’s always shocking to me that a privately funded school my wife and I have visited in the gigantic slums of Nairobi, Kenya, is able to do a better and smarter job of educating its poorest kids than our schools do.

The kids from the slum all wear uniforms, read lots of books and learn English – because, as school administrators will tell you, it is “the language of success.”

The school officials in Nairobi know that getting a good education – and speaking English — is the only sure way for their poor kids to get out of the slums and achieve success.

Why don’t we know that yet in California? Why don’t the left-liberal trio of Harris, Booker and Warren get that?

Instead of coming back to beg more money from the rich liberal elites of California, I challenge Harris, Booker, Warren and the others to go instead to see how education works in that school in Nairobi. They might learn something.

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Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].

Dove season opens in California and across the U.S. on Sept. 1.

For as long as I can remember, all I had to do when dove season rolled around each year was oil my 1970s-vintage shotgun, buy a case or two of shells at the nearby Big Five sports store and drive toward the Arizona border with my hunting buddies for a few happy days of shooting.

But thanks to a proposition approved by 63 percent of Californians in 2016 and the leftist Democrat lawmakers in Sacramento who’ve been wrecking the state for 40 years, dove season this year will be much more complicated.

A new state law aimed at reducing gun violence took effect on July 1 that requires anyone who buys ammo for any kind of gun to first pass a state background check.

If you’re one of California’s 4.5 million gun owners who has bought a gun recently, it’s no big deal.

You are already in the state’s database as a registered gun owner, so you don’t need to clear another background check.

But if you’re someone like me who hasn’t purchased a gun since the 1970s, when you could buy a deer rifle or shotgun at Sears as easily as buying a lawn mower, you’re in for some serious bureaucratic torture.

Before I can buy the shotgun shells I’ll need this year, I have to go to a state-licensed vendor (a sporting goods store), give them all my information, show them my California driver’s ID and then pass a background check that takes anywhere from 3 to 30 days to clear.

After I pass my $19 background check I have 30 days to buy the shotgun shells I’ll need. If after 30 days I need to buy more shells, I’ll have to pay another $19 for another background check.

The DMV-like process of buying ammo in California is bad enough, but if I’m not careful about how or where I get my shotgun shells,I could become a criminal.

Let’s say I’m out in the field next month and I run out of shells after a day or two of shooting.

According to the new law, the only place I’d be allowed to buy more shells is at the same sports store where I passed my background check – which would be a hundred miles away.

What if I asked one of my hunting buddies to give me a box of his shells?

Good idea, but if he gives them to me he’ll break the new ammo law because he didn’t do a background check on me first.

A person from a less liberal state like Pennsylvania might ask, “Why don’t you just go out of state to Arizona and buy your shells there?”

It’s a perfectly sensible idea – except that if you are caught bringing more than 90 rounds of ammo into California you can go to jail.

And don’t think you are free to order your ammunition online. Manufacturers aren’t allowed to ship directly to individuals in the state, just to licensed ammunition vendors like Big Five.

The end result of all this anti-ammo-madness is that somehow on Sept. 1 all of us will be breaking the law at some point by sharing shotgun shells.

It’s the usual California political story — a bad law written by liberals that will do no good and only turn law-abiding citizens like me and my pals into criminals.

Oh, and there’s another effect of the ammo law that my dog could have predicted — a shortage of ammunition in California.

There’s little shotgun ammunition in stores right now because the people who used to buy a case or two of shells for $80 each year hurried out and bought 10 cases before the anti-ammo law went into effect July 1.

So, in other words, what the geniuses in state government have done in a futile attempt to reduce gun violence is create a whole bunch of well-armed dove shooters who are hoarding enough ammunition for their guns to last the rest of their lives.

I hope the bad guys don’t find out where we live.

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Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. 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].