Presidents are royalty and we measure our lives by their reigns, but their effect on the country in general is greatly exaggerated. Take me, for example. Mr. Lyndon Johnson’s Selective Service System more or less governed my 20s, and now that I’m old and shaky, his Medicare is very helpful, but for most of us…
Ziegler said he wanted to see the entire system torpedoed and rebuilt. “I think the conservative media is the worst thing that has ever happened to the Republican Party on a national level,” he opined. “Take a look at — now this is not Rush's fault. But if you look at the presidential elections before Rush Limbaugh…
Old, white, wrinkled and angry, they are slipping from polite society in alarming numbers. We’re losing much of a generation. They often sport hats or other clothing, some marking their status as veterans, Tea Partyers or “patriots” of some kind or another. They have yellow flags, bumper stickers and an unquenchable…
This aide and other Republicans describe a recurring chicken-and-egg question: Who came first to these hardline, no-compromise stands – conservative media or their audiences? Are media celebrities and outlets simply reflecting their audiences, or shaping the views of readers, listeners and viewers? “I think they just…
As for those in the widening world of conservative media, for all of their complaints about the establishment, they are only too happy to acknowledge their influence in shaping the political agenda. “I don’t think conservative media is shaping it as much as it would like to, but it’s shaping it more than Washington…
In her coming history of conservative media, Hemmer writes, “In the 1950s, conservative media outlets were neither numerous nor powerful enough to create an entirely alternate media ecosystem” for like-minded Americans.[125] Sixty years later, apparently they are. And the Republican Party is grappling with the…
In the end, politics is about story. Robert McKee, Hollywood's master of storytelling, views the world from the top of America's other great cultural export—its movies. "1 think that the American ethos is not science-friendly and never has been," he says. "The American model is Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Guys who…
The intellectual erosion of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as science sat silently on the sidelines and anti-science rose to rule on both the left and the right, was greatly worsened in August of 1987 when, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) abolished what…
Recently, President Bush declared the vast ocean and archipelago known as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a national monument. At 1,400 miles long and 100 miles wide, the site is loo times larger than Yosemite National Park, larger than forty-six of the fifty states, and home to more than 7,000 marine species…
mitt romney believes in cornfields and grandpas, also touchscreens and robots. okay. more cornfields and large farming equipment and old american cars. here's another mitt romney ad. it's called american optimism. it's 30 seconds long. do you see a single eperson who looks to be anything other than white? anyone? he's…
A number of years ago, I gave a series of messages on the life of King David of old. I entitled the series, "A Portrait of a Champion." One of the messages in that series was called, "Champions Know How to Repent." Even a great champion for God such as King David messed up "royally" and had to repent ... This brings…
President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War Two in Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi concentration camp victims. Living in the film world, he apparently confused a movie he had seen with a reality he had not. On many occasions in his Presidential campaigns, Mr Reagan told an epic story of…
Turns out that a lot of the things that have happened in the lest than two years of this administration are the biggest or first or most important in generations. On the occasion of the Wall Street Reform announcement today, Tagan Godard at CQ politics wrote "Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform…