Cagle World

Every time I see the latest economic news, I thank Hillary Clinton.

Every time I see those high GDP numbers (up 3.2 percent last quarter), I thank Hillary.

Every time I see those record low unemployment numbers for blacks, Latinos and women, I thank Hillary.

If she hadn’t been such a horrible candidate in 2016, there’s no telling what sorry state America would be in right now.

So thank you, Hillary, for being such a loser.

You did your country a greater service than you’ll ever know.

I don’t really blame Hillary too much for refusing to accept her embarrassing defeat and deciding to spend the rest of her public life posing as a professional victim of a conspiracy that never happened.

In the pretend world where she lives, the Trump-hating Democrats running the House of Representatives and the Trump-hating Democrats running the mainstream liberal media want to re-investigate the Russian collusion delusion from scratch.

They’re still deluding themselves about bringing down Trump and they know it. They know that even if the House impeaches Trump, the Senate won’t impeach him in a million years.

In other words, the Democrats know their multiple hearings are nothing but partisan TV stunts designed to constantly smear Trump and his family and discredit Attorney General William Barr before he digs up the dirt about the FBI’s rogue spying operation on the 2016 Trump campaign.

The good thing is, you don’t have to bother watching the House’s hearings live or pay attention to how the committees vote.

Everyone already knows exactly what the final scores are going to be – straight party-line votes in favor of the majority Democrats’ efforts to impeach, probe or immediately hang the president.

Meanwhile, the liberal media never get around to asking the Democrats in the House why they aren’t busy writing new legislation to reform health care or fund infrastructure repair.

Come on, Nancy.

It’s time to send your new legislation over to the Senate so it can be sent over to be signed by the President. Where is it?

While the liberal media keeps busy finding new ways to hate Trump, a hundred Democratic presidential wannabes who hope to go on their party’s suicide mission in 2020 are wandering around Iowa, hating on Trump, doing bad impersonations of socialists and making wilder and wilder promises they can’t keep.

“Medicare for all,” free college for all, “free” federal money for all deposited in a bank account every year just for being born a future Democrat.

Wouldn’t it be nice if a journalist at CNN, MSNBC, CBS or the New York Times seriously challenged one of these irresponsible promise-makers?

Instead of the usual softball question, what if Wolf Blitzer threw a surprise fastball at the head of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren?

What if he asked them something complicated like, “What do you think about passing legislation to end the monopoly protections given in each state to healthcare companies and allowing the companies to sell insurance across state lines?”

“I think it’s called ‘competition,’ ” Wolf could say. “It allows consumers to shop around for the best deal for themselves and their families. It’s worked pretty well with cars, TVs and vegetables.Do you think it might work with health care?”

Don’t worry.

No one in the mainstream media will ever dare to ask that kind of question to a Democrat.

They’re only asked questions that can be answered with “I really really hate Trump.”

Let’s face it.

We’re going to have this kind of anti-Trump insanity in America for the next 18 months.

The deranged mainstream media – electronic and what’s left of print – is never going to go back to presenting what we used to call “The news.”

So in order to not go crazy yourself, I suggest that you follow my favorite advice.

Turn off the TV for the weekend – at least.

Listen to a lot of loud country music – real loud.

And remember to honor your mother.

–

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].

So who was the big winner in Wednesday’s televised street fight at the Senate Judiciary Committee?

Was it the veteran D.C. lawyer, the brilliant and unflappable Attorney General William Barr?

Was it the rude, permanently Trump-deranged, visibly stupid Democratic senators who treated Barr like a war criminal?

Or was it the committee’s star chairman, the eloquent, F-bomb dropping Sen. Lindsay Graham?

Or was it none of the above?

The Democratic senators fought dirty, but there were no knock outs.

Barr took all the slander, name calling and calls for him to resign from nasty Kamala Harris and Hawaii’s official state embarrassment Mazie Hirono, and he counter-punched with facts and quoted the appropriate laws.

Fox News, the White House, Nancy Pelosi, Republicans, Democrats, conservative talk radio and the MSNBC-CNN-NYT community of ethically challenged journalists each think their side was the one that won.

We’ll see.

In the long run, I think the big winner on Wednesday will turn out to be President Trump – in 2020.

But for now, the biggest winner was Vladimir Putin.

The Senate hearing on TV was further proof that the Russian dictator’s efforts to create chaos in American politics by messing with the 2016 election were still paying dividends three years later.

The public release of the barely redacted Mueller Report has only stirred up more political chaos and divisiveness, mainly because it didn’t end the way deranged Dems and the liberal media always dreamed it would – with Trump on trial for treason.

Trump has been officially cleared of Russian collusion/conspiracy charges and obstruction.

And now, ironically, it’s Democrats like Hillary and some of the patriotically challenged appointees who ran the Obama FBI and other intelligence agencies who are going to learn how it feels to have to hire a four-figure-an-hour defense lawyer and cooperate with FBI prosecutors.

Meanwhile, as Democrats desperately look for ways to keep the Mueller Report and the myth of Trump’s treason and obstruction of justice from falling off the front page, the USA has some really important stuff it should be dealing with.

Remember the crisis on the southern border? What’s happening in Venezuela? The trade deal with China?

Every day that the Democrats hold a hearing on the Mueller Report, or try to get Trump’s income tax returns, is another day Washington doesn’t address those serious national issues.

I can hear Putin laughing at America now – and rightly so. His strategy is still working. He and his Russian chaos-makers are still winning.

Look how deeply the Russians and Cuba are involved in the current crisis in Venezuela. Congress should be focused on that problem – and important things like immigration or infrastructure.

But House Democrats and the liberal media can’t quit trying to find new ways to keep President Trump from being reelected.

They know they can’t hurt Trump, so they’re trying to destroy his attorney general’s character by calling him a liar and a puppet of the president.

Barr was smart not to go before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

It was a set-up, a political trial, an inquisition designed to trap him or show him up and give the hysterics at CNN something new to wring their hands about for a few days.

And anyway, Barr didn’t need to waste any more time with the House’s delusional Democrats.

As the new attorney general, he has a lot of more important work to do.

He’s got to investigate how a rogue gang of Obama/Hillary Democrats running the FBI were able to use a dossier from Russia they knew was fake to get a secret federal court to give them permission to launch a surveillance investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign.

And along the way he has to dig up answers to some questions that might be shocking.

Questions like: How did that sleazy operation got started? Who in the upper reaches of the Obama administration knew it was going on? And whose idea it was to smear Trump with fake Russian dirt?

I wouldn’t be too surprised if Barr finds out the Russians helped Hillary and the Democrats do it.

–

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.

I was out of the country for a week with my wife, but when we got back it was like nothing had changed.

The national media were still yakking and arguing about the same BS they were when we left.

Depending on what TV channel you turned on, it was still either all pro-Trump or all anti-Trump, all pro-wall or all anti-wall.

This week Democrats and Republicans in Congress were still fighting over whether the increasing number of illegal immigrants crashing our southern border is a fake crisis or a real national emergency, as President Trump has declared.

And the tear-jerk liberal media are still mostly worried about whether the caravans of illegal immigrant families from Central America seeking asylum are being welcomed warmly and taken care of properly by our government at the border.

But in the country’s great illegal immigration debate do you know whose needs no one in Washington or in the mainstream media is talking about ?

The immigrants who are already here in America – the legal ones.

Most of these forgotten immigrants are Latino, and millions of them are U.S. citizens or green-card holders with low-skill, low-paying jobs.

I’m talking about the guy who parks my car at my favorite restaurant.

Or the woman who picks the strawberries I had in my cereal this morning.

Or the wonderful man from Guatemala who takes care of my lawn.

As far as I can see, no big shots in Congress or in the media care in the least about how these hardworking people will be hurt by hundreds of thousands of new illegal immigrants storming across our southern border.

The illegal immigrants are not going to take away the jobs of anyone you see on TV or listen to on radio.

They’re not going to take anyone’s high-paying job at Google, Morgan Stanley or in the federal government.

But they will take away the jobs of people who are washing dishes, cleaning houses, cooking food and nannying the kids of the wealthy and powerful.

The working-class immigrants who are already here will be the first ones to lose their jobs or see their hourly wages go down – and they know it.

They’re the ones whose children are in already overcrowded and under-performing public schools in California that will be swamped by more kids who don’t speak English.

No one politically important or powerful is standing up for the country’s forgotten immigrants, and Latinos are afraid to say anything in support of a stronger wall, or in support of President Trump, for fear of being ostracized in their own community.

But the reality is that many legal Latino immigrants, like my gardener, are scared to death of a flood of illegals coming across the border.

The growing popularity of President Trump among the country’s 32 million Latino voters -which was 28 percent in 2016 and has risen to nearly 50 percent according to a recent poll -reflects how strongly many Latinos dislike illegal immigration.

Unfortunately, however, President Trump is not taking political advantage of the real concerns of working-class Latinos.

If I were the president, I’d do what my father would have done – turn the tables on the Democrats, go over the heads of the liberal media and tell the forgotten immigrant story to the whole country.

I’d hold a series of press conferences and photo ops in Latino neighborhoods in California and Texas.

I’d make it clear to Latinos – and every voter in the USA – that Latino American workers will be the primary victims of the Democrats’ irresponsible positions on illegal immigration.

My father and his White House crew would have known how to do it the right way. He was very good at going on TV and telling the country stories.

So is President Trump. And if he’s going to get the Latino votes he’ll need to win reelection in 2020, he’s got make sure that every Latino knows he cares what bad things will happen to them if he loses.

–

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].

Jussie Smollett didn’t think he was getting paid enough for acting in “Empire.”

The poor guy was only getting $20,000 per episode – pocket change in episodic TV land – and he’s been a regular character on the popular Fox dramatic series since 2015.

He apparently thought that if he got a big splash of national publicity, Fox would have to pay him more.

So last month the gay black former child actor and proud Trump hater played the racist card, the homophobic card and the “I hate Trump” card – all at once.

As the entire country has since found out, Smollett staged a hate crime on the cold streets of Chicago starring himself as the victim.

To make sure his attack was sympathetically covered by the media, he told police he was beaten up by two racist, homophobic supporters of Donald Trump in red MAGA hats who, for extra measure, poured bleach on him and put a noose around his neck.

To everyone not working in the liberal media or for the Democrat Party, Smollett’s story stunk to high heaven from the get-go.

It was too politically perfect to be true, full of implausible holes and sounded like it was ripped from the script of a bad TV cop show.

But Don Lemon of CNN, Robin Roberts of ABC and the professional Trump-haters on “Morning Joe” and elsewhere swallowed Smollett’s phony story hook, line and sinker.

To them, there is nothing too evil or disgusting that the bigoted supporters of Donald Trump wouldn’t do.

Therefore, Smollett’s outlandish tale didn’t need to be questioned, checked out by the liberal media or even confirmed by police.

It fit their anti-Trump narrative perfectly, so what he claimed happened was automatically true and automatically to be believed.

Thanks to the work of Chicago police, however, we now know Smollett paid two friends $3,500 to help him stage a hate crime because he allegedly was unhappy with his salary.

At a press conference Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson said it right: Smollett “took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career. I’m left hanging my head and asking why.”

Why? Because Smollett is a troubled egomaniac and had every reason to believe he could get away with it.

He knew his pal Lemon, Hollywood celebrities and left-wing Democrats like Cory Booker would immediately fall for his tale and use it to “prove” their claim that Donald Trump has created a more racist and more homophobic America.

Chicago Police Supt. Johnson was terrific. He blasted the celebrities, media people and presidential candidates for giving Smollett’s “phony attack” so much favorable national publicity.

But where is the outrage of the black community? Where is the outrage of the LGBTQ community?

They are the ones who should be most offended by Smollett’s incredibly inept scheme to become a celebrity victim, because his stunt has diminished the credibility of real hate crimes in the future.

Smollett smeared Trump’s supporters as racists and bigots. He also smeared the ordinary people of Chicago and the U.S.

In the long run his hate hoax and bald-faced lying afterwards have done a public service he never dreamed it would.

It exposed the fake news media for what they are to the whole country and proved how deep and wide the Trump derangement syndrome is in the media and in Hollywood.

Smollett got the attention he craved, but his hoax backfired on him. His scenes in the final episodes of “Empire” reportedly have been drastically cut back.

He could end up in jail for three years for filing a false police report, but in the long run he’ll be excused or forgiven by Hollywood and the liberal media because he’s such a devout Trump hater.

In fact, it won’t surprise me if his progressive friends in La-La Land give him a special Oscar Sunday night for the acting job he did in his dishonest interview with Robin Roberts on “Good Morning America.”

–

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].

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the looniest lefty I’ve seen elected to Congress in my lifetime.

But Ilhan Omar, her fellow rookie House member from Minnesota, is so radical she scares the pants off me.

After watching Omar in action, it’s pretty clear to me that the Muslim Democrat hates America almost as much as she hates Israel.

Before she got to Washington she had already raised eyebrows for her support of the socialist dictator who’s wrecked Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and her call to abolish ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

She’s also a big fan of sanctuary cities and opposes President Trump’s border wall because it’s “racist and sinful.”

But this week, Omar got in big trouble for a tweet insinuating that the prime reason U.S. politicians so faithfully support Israel is because they get lots of money from AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel lobbying group in the country.

She apologized profusely, but only after Republicans and the grown-up members of her own party loudly condemned her statements as anti-Semitic and “deeply offensive.”

It’s too bad Omar didn’t take up President Trump’s suggestion that she resign from Congress – or at least voluntarily step down from her spot on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Now it looks like we’re going to be tortured by the liberal media’s soft coverage of Omar’s anti-Americanism and AOC’s idiotic Green New Deal for the next two years.

Omar, AOC and their followers would never admit it, but their elections have something in common with President Trump.

All three of them are political outsiders who were elected in part because millions of voters are tired of the do-nothing Democrats and Republicans in Congress who can’t – or simply won’t — solve the country’s most important issues.

Take immigration reform, please.

It’s been 33 years since my father signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which granted amnesty to about 4 million illegal immigrants and was supposed to reform U.S. immigration policy but never did because of Congress.

Since 1986 Democrats and Republicans have done virtually nothing to fix immigration or secure the border.

At one point or another, they each have had control of both the White House and Congress – and still nothing.

The dirty secret everyone in Washington knows is that politicians in both parties don’t really want to solve the immigration problem.

Ever.

Both political parties, or groups within them, want the immigration issue to be in a constant state of debate.

That way during election time they can use their tough position on a border wall, or their demands for amnesty for illegals, to raise money for themselves and their parties.

It’s all about raising money.

If the immigration problem is solved, the politicians will lose millions, so they work overtime for years to make sure they do nothing.

That strategy, combined with blind hatred for President Trump, is why we have this latest crisis revolving around immigration – legal and illegal.

You can take it to the bank that no matter what temporary band-aid President Trump and the Democrats sign this week, if they do, immigration and border security will still be a major issue in the 2020 elections.

Until then, thanks to the selfish do-nothings in Congress and despite President Trump’s one-man crusade, we won’t have a proper border wall with Mexico.

But we’ll still have sanctuary cities – and states – where illegals are protected from immigration laws and supplied with free health, welfare and educational benefits.

We’ll still have a path to legal immigration that is bureaucratic, expensive, lawyer-intensive and takes so many years to complete that it encourages illegal immigration.

And because the entrenched men and women in Washington refuse to do their jobs and solve important issues like immigration or health care reform, they’ll keep the side door to Congress open for more radical socialists and Jew-hating Muslims.

Which is why I’m feeling more scared than ever for the future of my kids and grandkids.

–

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].

It’s not often you get to really laugh at politics.

But thanks to a bunch of self-exploding Democrats in Virginia and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Republicans had some good chuckles this week.

Since the midterm elections last fall, Republicans have been down in the dumps and Democrats have been riding high and mighty.

Democrat leaders spent January gloating about retaking control of the House of Representatives, coming up with 152 ways to impeach President Trump and voicing support for the dumb legislative ideas of their star rookie socialist, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of NYC.

Rep. Adam Schiff, my Southern California congressman, has promised every camera he’s looked into since last November that his House committee was going to spend the next two years investigating several decades of Donald Trump’s business records, tax returns and, if necessary, his golf scores.

But this week, as President Trump delivered a great State of the Union speech, the Democrats got knocked down off their high moral horse by a series of scandals involving the personal and moral failings of their guys running the state of Virginia.

First to topple was Gov. Ralph Northam, a pediatrician who had already recently shocked much of the country by advocating the abortion of a full-term infant with deformities after it was born.

That Dr. Mengele-like position brought calls from the pro-life community for him to resign, but he didn’t, and he got a predictable free pass from pro-abortion Democrats and the liberal media.

What really got Gov. Northam in deep trouble with his own party happened a few days later, when unflattering pictures of him surfaced from a 1984 medical school year book.

Gov. Northam was seen either in blackface or wearing a KKK hood. No one – including him – was sure which person he was.

He ended up denying it was him in either racist costume, but then confessed at a bizarre press conference that he once wore blackface as part of a Michael Jackson impersonation – and even offered to perform a “moonwalk” for reporters to prove it.

While Republicans chuckled at the antics of the Democrats of Virginia, and almost everyone in his own party clamored for Gov. Northam to resign, we learned that Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, the next in succession, was in even more serious trouble.

A professor from Southern California had publicly, graphically and credibly alleged that Lt. Gov. Fairfax violently sexually assaulted her at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004.

Whoops. A liberal chicken had come home to roost in the new Democrat Party.

In the post-Judge Kavanaugh era, where liberals have declared that sexual assault victims are always to be believed, that means Fairfax is almost certainly a goner, no matter how strongly he denies the woman’s allegation.

That leaves Democrat Attorney General Mark Herring next in line to become Virginia’s governor, but Herring is also in trouble with his party because he too has admitted that he put on blackface to impersonate a rapper while at the University of Virginia in 1980.

We don’t know yet if one or all of the tarnished Democrats will be forced to resign.

It’s not something their party wants to see happen, no matter how guilty they all may be, because if they all go, a Republican – state House Speaker Kirk Cox – would become governor of Virginia.

It’s no joke, but it’d be really funny if it came true.

Cox is fourth in the line of succession only because a name was drawn out of a bowl to settle a tied state House race last fall, and that’s what gave Republicans control of Virginia’s House.

As if the Virginians didn’t do enough damage to the Democrat Party this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren also did her part.

The fake Native American who wants to become president had to apologize because she was caught lying about her heritage – again – after the Washington Post published a copy of a registration card she signed in 1986 for admittance to the Texas bar on which she identified her race as “American Indian.”

As I said, it was a great week to just sit back and laugh.

–

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].

Super Bowl week isn’t just the biggest, holiest and most publicized event of the year for America’s sports fans.

Unfortunately, it’s also a popular event for America’s human sex trafficking industry.

It’s a myth that the Super Bowl is the country’s largest annual sex-trafficking event.

Every sports championship, convention or city where men with money go in large numbers attracts professional sellers of illegal sex from around the country.

But there’s no doubt that thousands of them have flocked to Atlanta for Sunday’s Rams-Patriots matchup.

Federal agents have already reported arresting 33 people this week on charges of sex trafficking, which often involves underaged girls and boys who’ve been forced into prostitution.

But Atlanta is no stranger to the illegal sex-trafficking trade. Like Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego, it has been a center of human sex trafficking activity for years.

According to the FBI, its predators specialize in children from Mexico.

The statistics on human sex trafficking are not easy to get with precision, but they are grim.

The second largest international crime industry behind illegal drugs, human trafficking reportedly includes 40 million people and generates $32 billion in profit a year, half of which is in industrialized countries.

According to the U.S. State Department, as many as 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year, including an estimated 15,000 into the United States.

Most human trafficking worldwide – about 80 percent — involves sexual exploitation and the rest involves labor exploitation. About 80 percent of all trafficking victims are female and half are children.

In the United States the average age of a teen who is forced into the sex trade is 12 to 14 years old.Many of them are troubled runaway girls who were sexually abused as children.

Many are graduates of our horrible, broken foster care system. As I’ve said before, if you really want to fix sex trafficking in America, you have to first fix foster care.

Each year, like a baseball farm system, it feeds the sex-trafficking industry with a steady stream of fresh prostitutes. Many are recruited by their friends who aged out of foster care at 18 the previous year.

In 2014 I wrote a column about sex trafficking and the Super Bowl with Jerome Elam, who at five years old was forced by his stepfather to become a sex slave for pedophiles in Florida.

Elam, who was also coerced into child pornography and forced to take drugs, attended school and appeared to be a normal kid.

He only escaped from his hell after a suicide attempt – at age 12 – landed him in a hospital emergency room. Today my friend is a writer and child advocate who speaks around the world about the evils of sex-trafficking.

We don’t hear much about America’s sex-trafficking business in the mainstream media except when the Super Bowl Sunday rolls around.

You might read a report in USA Today or online about some arrests, but the big newscasters, the cable shows and the sportscasters are not going to touch the sex-trafficking issue, much less get outraged by it.

That’s the tragedy.

Everyone says over and over they want to save the children from sexual predators, but that’s a lot of BS.

The only way sex trafficking in the United States is going to get the publicity it deserves is if some famous sportscaster or bigwig politician has one of their kids kidnapped and sex trafficked.

Then they’ll call for Congress and everyone else to do something about the sick men in our midst who pay to have sex with children and the evil creeps who make it happen. Until then, expect crickets. Absolute crickets.

Super Bowl Sunday is a good time for the media to start talking seriously about human sex trafficking and what to do about it. But let’s not forget about it on Monday, because the traffickers won’t.

–

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].

Here’s a scary political thought for all Americans.

If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were old enough, and American voters were stupid enough, she could be elected president next year.

“AOC” – as the rookie House member from New York City has been nicknamed – is only 28, which makes her constitutionally too young to join the mob of mostly leftwing Democrats competing to run against Donald Trump next year.

But according to a recent poll, 74 percent of Democrats said if given the chance they’d vote for Ocasio-Cortez for president in 2020.

Don’t worry.

Our country’s celebrated young social warrior is never going to be elected president of the United States – not even if she lives to be Hillary Clinton’s age and gets lots of free help from Stephen Colbert, the Russians or the FBI.

AOC’s age and inexperience are not her biggest obstacles, though.

It’s her really bad socialist ideas – free health care for all, free college for all, confiscatory 70 percent tax rates for millionaires, etc. – that’ll keep her from the White House.

Her leftwing positions, which appeal to the historical and economic ignorance of her fellow millennials and the slobbering liberal media, are actually not much worse than those of most of the presidential wannabes in her party.

She’s just more enthusiastic, more youthful and more giggly – and already knows how to tweet like a president.

For now – and probably forever – AOC’s role is to be the cheerful mascot of the national Democratic Party, which, like her, has decided that the way to make the country great again is to exchange American capitalism for Venezuelan-style socialism.

She and her socialist friends pose no real threat to Trump or Republicans or America.

American voters – especially the older ones of both parties who remember when America was great – are too smart and sensible.

They’ll never let her or one of her older socialist brothers or sisters get in the Oval Office. Ditto for Grandpa Bernie.

Ocasio-Cortez and her generation are clueless about America’s greatness because they were taught a bunch of leftwing history in school.

They have no recollection of when America was great, how we got to be so great and prosperous or what made us the leader of the free world.

There’s only one big guy in Washington talking about America being great and keeping it great.

It’s the president. And he’s taken to task and abused every day, by almost everyone, for everything he says and does.

Meanwhile, as the Democrats in the House of Pelosi waste their days investigating President Trump and trying to block anything he wants to do, their national party is making a hard turn to the left.

Ocasio-Cortez is the celebrity bus driver with no GPS. The liberal media treat her like a political genius, mainly because they are as dumb as she is about the benefits of things like capitalism and border walls.

But despite what she and her fellow socialists in the Democrat Party think, they are not going to lead the country to a better, greater place in 2020. They’re just leading their party over a cliff.

–

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].

No matter where you look, you can’t escape it.

“Government Shutdown – Day 27… ”

“Government Shutdown – Day 28… “(/strong)

The partial government shutdown – and who’s to blame for it, who’s being hurt most by it and who’s going to blink first – is the top topic on television, cable, talk radio, the internet and in the papers.

It’s so pervasive in all the news media it feels like you’re watching a daily “Groundhog Day” movie about partisan politics and biased journalism.

Everyone who is interviewed about the shutdown on Fox, CNN, NBC and elsewhere says the same predictable things over and over.

If Republicans are asked who’s to blame, it’s Pelosi and Schumer. If a Democrat is asked, they blame the President and Republicans.

You already know by now nearly everything you’re going to see or hear in the future about the shutdown. You don’t have to listen to today’s repeat questions because you already know the answers.

The same thing was true for those who watched this week’s Senate hearings on Trump’s Attorney General nominee William Barr.

It was the same bad TV movie starring politicians we’ve all seen in DC many times before. You knew every politician would go by the script, play to the cameras and pander to their party’s base — and they did.

You also knew how the media coverage would go down: You were going to love what Fox said and hate what CNN said, or vice versa.

So the big question is, why should you waste a minute of your time on the daily news coverage of the government shutdown? Why torture yourself? Why get frustrated and angry?

You know you can’t do a thing about ending the government shutdown or brokering a compromise deal between the Democrats and the president.

Instead of getting so mad you feel like throwing your beer bottle or coffee cup at the TV set, why not find something more enjoyable to do with your time?

Maybe you should do what I do.

Turn off the TV and talk radio for a few days. Don’t listen to the news. When you’re in the car, tune into to Y2 Country, the Highway or the Bridge on Sirius XM.

Turn on sports radio. Binge on Netflix. Watch an NFL playoff game this weekend.

Better yet, try to find a good laugh or joke in everything you do or see in your political world, as I do as often as possible.

Sometimes my search for humor in the swamp of politics goes a bit too far, I admit.

For example, when I had a colonoscopy a while ago the doctors found a bit of colon cancer. They cut it out and I’m good, thanks. (By the way, everyone should get colonoscopy. It could save your life.)

When I told people about my medical procedure, my little joke was that, “The president was lying next to me in the recovery room and he had a colonoscopy too – and they found Fox News. They did one on Chuck Schumer too – and found CNN.”

If I told that joke on TV, they’d never have me on the air again, but I still think it’s an example of good, bipartisan political humor.

The sad truth is, in the Age of Trump, jokes and humor of any kind are getting harder to find – or tell.

Too many Americans have not only lost their sense of humor, they’ve lost their ability to take a joke.

Comedians like Seinfeld won’t perform on college campuses because students are such over-protected snowflakes.

Meanwhile, people like me who grew up in the 1960s can’t bear to watch “Saturday Night Live” or late-night television anymore.

The openly partisan hosts of those shows today are not only not very funny, they think their nightly job is to prove how much they hate the president and Republicans.

They don’t want to send you to sleep with a smile on your face the way Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and even David Letterman did in his early days.

They want you to go to bed angry – especially at Trump.

The late-night hosts and their liberal soulmates in Hollywood have not just poisoned our pop culture with their political correctness and left-wing politics.

By making it harder and harder to find a good laugh when you need one to make our bad politics go away, they’ve taken a lot of the fun out of America.

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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].

Trump vs. the Crazies

If for some strange reason you didn’t already know how much the liberal media hates President Trump, you found out this week.

The Trump Hate Machine got revved up even before the president gave his national prime-time address Tuesday night about what he called “the growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.”

Some of the country’s most desperate liberals in the media actually argued that the president’s televised pitch to the country for congressional funding for a stronger border fence should not be carried live by the networks.

Why? Because they said the president lies too much and they wanted to be able to fact-check his speech beforehand.

Of course, no one in the liberal media would have ever dreamed of showing such disrespect ,’ and obvious bias – for one of Barrack Obama’s nationally televised pontifications.

Obama’s lies and false promises about the benefits of ObamaCare, like his misleading spinning about his administration’s fiascoes in the Middle East, were not checked, challenged or ridiculed immediately afterwards by the pundits, commentators or biased fact-checkers of the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, NPR,etc., etc., et liberal cetera.

In his tweets and at his press conferences does our current president embellish, exaggerate or stretch the facts to serve his political arguments or boost his record?

Of course he does.

Is he the first president in the history of America to do so?

Of course not.

It doesn’t make it OK for any president of any party to lie to the public or deliberately over-promise things to win political support, and if they do they should be called out on it by a fair, balanced and honest media.

But wouldn’t it be nice if our liberal media spent a little time fact-checking the Chuck Schumers & Nancy Pelosis of the world?

The least they could do is find 30 seconds of airtime to show some pre-Trump Era video clips of “see-no-crisis-at-the-border” Democrats like Schumer, Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton warning Americans about the dangers of illegal immigrants and calling for stronger border security.

We know the liberal mainstream media don’t play fair, they play favorites.They’ll never seek out and publicize the flip-flops or hypocrisies of the Schumers & Pelosis.

But you can always count on the liberal media to over-publicize the supposedly terrible suffering caused by a partial government shutdown, which they have been busy doing.

So here were are with the president in a political stalemate.

Democrats in Congress led by Schumer & Pelosi don’t want a stronger border fence (now that Trump is for it) and refuse to give the president a dollar to fund it.

They and other Democrats in Congress and the media don’t think caravans of illegal immigrants trying to crash our border with Mexico qualify as a national emergency, which Trump says he has the power to declare to get his fence built if Democrats won’t compromise.

As I see it, President Trump has no choice but to hold firm. I think he should hold firm and I think he will.

What worries me are the Republicans in Congress. I’m afraid they’re going to cave.

If enough of them join with Schumer & Pelosi and the Democrats, our border security will be in the hands of newly elected crazies like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. who think America should put out the welfare welcome mat for anyone who can get here.

If that happens, the rest of America will know what it’s like to live in California.

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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].