Reagan Cried Socialism Against Medicare

No wonder the rightwing is going berserk--former president Reagan, rightwing hero, warned Medicare would make the U.S. a socialist country. Medicare is the program that loony protesters love, clueless that it's government run. About 40 million of the U.S.'s 307 million people are on Medicare. Wow.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Harry Smith Shuts Down Snide Mitt Romney

Republicans have some sort of weird thing going on with Ronald Reagan. I understand having admiration of the former president, who has since passed away, but come on, get with the modern times. What worked then might not work now. If Reagan were president today, he might be doing things in a different way. But don't try telling that to conservatives pining for the past.
CBS' Harry Smith shuts down Mitt at about the 2 minute mark when Romney says Obama's stance on Iran wasn't like Reagan's "tear down this wall" moment.
Smith points out that was a very different occasion.
Romney is such a snot. His language is so spiteful and he has such venom for Obama, a psychologist might say he's plainly jealous. Many of the alpha males have troubles keeping their testosterone in check when it comes to Obama.
Watch the video here.

How Pete Souza Got to Be White House Photographer

Pete Souza, who was Ronald Reagan's photographer, says Obama and Reagan share a calm and collected mannerism.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Aspiring To Be Joe the Plumber

McCain and Palin know that they're not for the working voter and if you listen carefully, they'll say it.

They want to protect Joe the Plumber who aspires to be more, they say. The "more" means more money.

They don't support Joe the Plumber where he is now. They only support him when his business grows to a multi-million dollar company. But if McCain Palin can hoodwink people into thinking that liberals hate Joe the Plumbers, they win, while it's Joe the Plumber who's getting exploited.

After all, it's Obama who supports unions, who supports the middle class with a tax plan that will let them keep more of their money, rather than giving more tax breaks to the rich.

Here's one of the best pieces I've seen on this issue yet. It's by Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew:

WSJ: And yet here are the words of Ronald Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, as recorded in one of the main Reagan strategy documents from 1980: "People act on the basis of their perception of reality; there is, in fact, no political reality beyond what is perceived by the voters."

The context of Wirthlin's reality-denial, according to the historian Kim Phillips-Fein, who unearths his statement in her forthcoming book, "Invisible Hands," was the larger Republican plan to woo blue-collar voters.

The mission was a success. It worked because Republicans wholeheartedly adopted Wirthlin's dictum. Reality is a terrible impediment when you're reaching out to workers while simultaneously cracking down on unions and scheming to privatize Social Security. Leave that reality to the "reality-based community," to use the put-down coined by an aide to George W. Bush.

The "perception of reality," on the other hand, is an amazing political tonic, and with it conservatives have cemented a factproof worldview of lasting power. It is simply this: Conservatives are authentic and liberals are not. The country is divided into a land of the soulful, hard-working producers and a land of the paper-pushing parasites; a plain-spoken heartland and the sinister big cities, where they breed tricky characters like Barack Obama, all "eloquence," as John McCain sneered in last week's presidential debate, but hard to pin down.
...
Joe the Plumber -- along with his just-discovered supporter, Tito the Builder -- has brought to the GOP what Richard Wirthlin went looking for so long ago: blue-collar affirmation. But consider the degree of reality-blindness it takes to kick out the authenticity like Joe does. The rust-belt metro area in which he lives has been in decline for decades. In 2007, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranked it 335 out of 369 small metropolitan areas for unemployment; for home foreclosures, according to a 2007 article in the Toledo Blade, it is the 30 worst of all cities in the nation. According to Census numbers, median household income in the Toledo area, measured in constant dollars, has actually decreased since the late 1970s.

Joe's town may be circling the drain, but Joe's real concern, as the world knows, is that he might have to pay more taxes when his ship finally comes in. For good measure, Joe also declares Social Security "a joke": "I've never believed in it," he told reporters last week. Maybe that's because this realest of men knows that Social Security is just a hippie dream, despite the Census's insistence that 28% of his city's households received income from that source in 2003. Maybe all those people would be better off if we had invested Social Security's trust fund in WaMu and Wachovia -- you know, the real deal.
....
Here is the key to this whole strange episode: Government is artifice and imposition, a place of sexless bureaucrats and brie-eating liberals whose every touch contaminates God's work. Markets, by contrast, are natural, the arena in which real people prove their mettle. After all, as Mr. McCain said on Monday, small businessmen are just "Joe the Plumbers, writ large." Markets carry a form of organic authenticity that mere reality has no hope of touching.
I wanted to post the whole story but that wouldn't be right. Just go read it.

Obama Takes Berlin

Some people had some trouble with the "citizen of the world" part of Obama's speech. Guess who that was? 

As Keith Olbermann points out in this video, the beloved one -- Ronald Reagan -- said the same thing in one of his speeches. 

The critics seem to be stretching a little too far, desperate for something.

Obama's strategy to enlist help, to cooperate with the world, as opposed to dominate it, is what's needed.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that this election is largely a generational thing, moving America in a new direction with Obama or more of the same with McCain. I sure hope most Americans have the fortitude to move ahead.