If you believe the Washington Post George W. Bush is an insensitive lout devoid of compassion for the victims of the horrendous tragedy in South Asia.

Because he had the temerity to win re-election President Bush has also won the undying enmity of the Washington Post which seems determined to slit his throat every chance they get, no matter how outlandish their complaints.

Moreover they have their correspondents cooling their heels in Crawford Tx., deprived of so much as a glimpse of the president. In the egotism of the media elite, Bush should be wining and dining them on his ranch which they can’t get near, as he enjoys the solitude of a needed respite from their constant abrasive presence.

And so they dredge up an imaginative indictment charging that the president is seen by many as being insensitive to what they call to “a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions.”

In a slanderous piece entitled “Aid Grows Amid Remarks About President’s Absence” they cited just one source for this charge, who of course remains anonymous, and another who doesn’t quite say the President lacked sensitivity and informs its readers that “Bush’s decision at first to remain cloistered on his Texas ranch for the Christmas holiday rather than speak in person about the tragedy — showed scant appreciation for the magnitude of suffering and for the rescue and rebuilding work facing such nations as Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Indonesia.”

And they added this piece of garbage: There was an international outpouring of support after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and even some administration officials familiar with relief efforts said they were surprised that Bush had not appeared personally to comment on the tsunami tragedy. “It’s kind of freaky,” a (unnamed, of course) senior career official said.”

Oh?

Could it be that the president might have been occupied with putting together what is now the largest aid package headed for the victim countries as well as working out the details of a massive rescue effort on a scale never before seen? That he might have been so occupied with this responsibility that he simply had no time to go parade himself before a sullen media in Bill Clinton style to bite his lips and tell the victims how much he feels their pain?

That’s exactly what the Posties wanted, it being their preference for style over substance. They believe that emotion trumps substance - tears, biting lips and barely suppressed sobs are what such tragedies demand.

The Post also tells us “Clinton urges coordinated aid effort,” giving a boost to Mr. Clinton’s reported ambitions to replace Kofi Annan as Secretary General of the United Nations. Or perhaps it just a case of nobody having told Bill Clinton that he is no longer the President of the United States, a delusion he shares with Jimmy Carter.

Well it now appears that while the media were cooling their heels in their isolation from the seat of power, putting together a coordinated aid effort was precisely what George Bush was doing. But to the Post, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the president failed to recognize his solemn obligation to hobnob with the media at moments such as this.

It doesn’t appear to have occurred to the Post that there are times when a president has to do things behind closed doors. Not all presidents like to be out in front of the press saying in effect, “Look at me, I’m important, I’m biting my lip, I know how to cry” before going back inside and laughing at a media stupid enough to fall for his act.

This whole thing is typical liberal mishmash – it’s all about feelings. The Post would be happy if the president didn’t give a dime as long as we saw him cry.

What we are seeing here is what we’ll be seeing for the next four years. The Post didn’t want George Bush in the White House for another term and they won’t let up, even if they have to create stories about such nonsense as alleged presidential insensitivity.

They have no shame.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

Once upon a time, Americans recognized the unpleasant fact that, as Sherman said, “war is hell,” and they acted accordingly, accepting the pain and the losses as the price that had to be paid for victory.

Americans understood it during the Revolutionary War, when it took six long years of losing battle after battle to achieve victory. Facing the mightiest army on the face of the earth, lacking the most rudimentary tools of war, even going shoeless in the winter snow, often hungry, they endured -and by enduring they triumphed.

We don’t have to go that far back to find instances where the nation took it on the chin again and again, watching in horror the growing casualty lists, going without the staples of everyday living, often waking to read about another blood-soaked battlefield far away from the homeland, yet remaining firm in the resolve to stick it out.

We saw that in World War II when the cost of a single day’s combat was the lives of 5000 or 6000 husbands, fathers, and sons who would never come home to their loved ones. We understood that these things were the very nature of warfare, and we gritted our teeth and stayed the course. We went to war to win, and we endured until we did.

Something has happened since then. It may have been around before Vietnam, but it arrived in full force during that tragic war. Hammered time and time again by growing casualty lists, mislead by the media’s constant anti-war drumbeat that played up every failure and played down every victory - such as depicting the Tet Offensive, which utterly destroyed the Viet Cong, as a military disaster for the U.S.- we began to doubt ourselves. We lost the will to endure, and lost our first war as a result.

It’s happening again. We are fighting a war in Iraq, and the doubters and the opportunists who seek political gain are doing their utmost to create uncertainty about America’s involvement there.

That’s the case with those Republicans who are using Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as the current convenient target in their efforts to separate themselves from the Bush administration – a patently obvious maneuver to align themselves to run for president in 2008.

In the run-up to the November elections, the Democrats made it obvious they hoped that the economy would collapse before Election Day. They are now gleefully anticipating a collapse of the U.S. effort to win the war in Iraq, and they appear willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen, regardless of the damage it will do to the nation.

What we are seeing now is a steady wearing-down of our will to endure. Every death is reported as if death in combat was anything but the toll war normally exacts. We endured the deaths of 5,000 young Americans on the beaches of Normandy and forged ahead to free Europe of Nazi domination. We saw it as the price we had to pay to win. Some 6,000 U.S. Marines died in the sands of Iwo Jima in less than a month, but we endured that horror, and not long after we conquered Japan and won the war.

Yet when we lose 14 brave young men in a single insurgent bombing we act as if it were proof that we cannot prevail. Enough of that reasoning will sap our will to endure, and we will end up turning tail and running away, leaving turmoil in the area far worse and more dangerous to our interests than what existed before we went to war there.

Many Americans either opposed going to war in Iraq or expressed serious doubts about the wisdom of going to war there, but that debate is over. We are there, and we have to accept what General MacArthur once said: “There is no substitute for victory.”

And there is no substitute for endurance if victory is to be won.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

America’s public schools are now government schools, and they are in the hands of imbeciles.

• When school officials found a pair of scissors in ten-year-old Porsche Brown’s book bag, the fourth grade student at Philadelphia’s Thomas Holme Elementary School was handcuffed and hauled off to a police station even though the school district admitted she did not threaten anyone with them or even display them.

The scissors were discovered when students’ belongings were being searched for property missing from a teacher’s desk. The school’s excuse for this absurdity: Porsche violated a rule against having dangerous weapons in her possession. So they called police and had her handcuffed and taken to the police station in a filthy paddy wagon.

“They handcuffed her and she said (the handcuffs) were tight on her wrist and they took her out and she was put into a paddy wagon,” her mother Rose Jackson told NBC 10.

“She said there was blood in the back of the wagon and it smelled like urine,” Jackson added. “It was dark in there.”

Now if this isn’t crazy enough, consider the fact that nobody ever told Porsche or her mother that having pair of scissors in school was forbidden. And that’s not all: “I received a letter of things she needed for school and scissors were on there,” Jackson revealed.

At the police station cops realized that Porsche had committed no crime and they released her.

The school’s excuse – weapons are banned from the premises and scissors could be used as a weapon. But a No. 2 lead pencil can be used as a deadly weapon. Jammed into someone’s eye and into the brain it could kill the victim. Are No. 2 lead pencils banned? Of course not. Just about anything can be used as a weapon. A detective once showed me a fountain pen like the one he said had been used to kill someone. These laws are ridiculous. Sure, ban guns and daggers and explosive devices, but scissors?

If this were an isolated incident it might be considered an aberration. But this kind of nonsense is becoming commonplace in our idiotic government school system. Drugs are banned and a child can be expelled for having an aspirin. The school, however, doesn’t hesitate to force kids to take drugs to make them more docile and manageable. And those drugs have been shown sometimes to provoke students to kill themselves or their classmates.

• In Montgomery County Pennsylvania, honor student Chris McCarthy was expelled from class for the remainder of the school year at Upper Moreland High School for mistakenly bringing a pocketknife to class.

Said his dad David: “This kid has been jerked around because a penknife was in his pocket. This kid has never had a demerit or detention in 10 1/2 years of school”.

• A 5-year-old kindergartner was handcuffed by police at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a St. Louis charter school.

His mother admitted her son has had trouble adjusting to his first year of school but complained that “he didn’t do anything to deserve to be handcuffed. He is only 5,” she added. “Suspend him or do whatever, but you don’t handcuff him.”

Sam Morgan, the principal of Thurgood Marshall Academy, said he wanted to teach the boy a lesson to try to improve his unruly behavior.

“I’m trying to scare this kid straight,” he said. “I would not be doing my job if I were not trying to get him on the right path.”

Add to these outrages the current attempt by government schools across the nation to ban all mention of Christmas – the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who I guess is not considered politically correct.

These are all assaults on America’s parents who have lost control of what were once “public” schools but have now been taken over by big government and a host of imbecilic educrats who can’t tell a pair of scissors from a deadly weapon. These things will continue to happen until more and more parents yank their kids out of the government schools, or even better, take their schools back.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

The GOP’s main goal in 2004 is to win big in the presidential and senate races. That’s obvious. What’s less obvious is how they hope to get there.

Basically, what they want is Dean to be the Democrat presidential nominee in 2004 because they see him as the 2004 version of Walter Mondale, who also said he wanted to raise taxes when he ran in 1980 against my father. He promptly went down in a humiliating defeat.

There is still a lot of talk about Hillary or Al Gore running this year as vice presidential candidates which of course is just plain silly. Hillary is not going to be Howard Dean’s vice presidential running mate. After all, if Dean accidentally won the election, she couldn’t run for president in 2008 because Dean would certainly be a candidate for re-election that year. She’d have to wait until 2012 when she’ll be older and less attractive.

Moreover, Dean is out to clean the Clinton’s clock and wrest control of the party from them. As a result, she doesn’t want to do anything to help Dean because she wants him to lose so she can run in 2008. It’s all very Byzantine, but that’s the way Democrats think.

And no matter what Bill and Hillary’s lap dog candidate Gen. Wesley Clark says, Hillary is not going to consider being his or anybody else’s running mate. And of course the whole thing is moot anyway because Wesley Clark is not going to be the Democrat candidate this or any other year.

Now, for Al Gore. You have to understand that Gore did not endorse Dean so he could be what he’s already been: Vice President. People do not run for the presidency and lose and then take a step backward to be vice president again.

Besides, Al Gore certainly knows Dean will lose this year if he is the Democrat candidate. And that’s what he wants to happen because he is also eyeing a run in 2008. Here’s where it really gets Byzantine. By endorsing Howard Dean and joining forces with him to take party control away from the Clintons, he’ll then have de facto control of the party and that will help him win the 2008 nomination over Hillary.

What we are seeing now is a civil war taking place among the Democrats, and before it’s over there will be pools of blood all over the place. They are proving once again that Will Rogers was right when he said that he belonged to no organized political party – that he was a Democrat.

The Republicans are hoping that all of the ungodly amount of money that they have spent in this present congress and the bigger the government has grown under President Bush, especially with the new Medicare entitlement now well in place, will turn into enough votes in this year to win a big enough majority in the Senate so they can squash the filibusters the Democrats have been using. Then they’ll be able finally to redo Medicare the way it needs to be redone, and at last redo Social Security the way it needs to be redone, and get all the other things that need to be taken care of to get the nation back on the right track.

In order to get there they had to gamble by spending vast amounts of money and giving entitlements to the elderly who vote in large numbers. That’s their game plan. It’s a gamble and we’ll find out in November if the gamble pays off and they get the whopping majority in the Senate that will allow them to stave off those Democrat filibusters, get the judges approved, deal with Medicare and Social Security in a way that will save and strengthen both programs, and hopefully fix our ridiculous and ruinous tax system.

To sum up, if the Republicans get their wishes fulfilled, Dean will win the nomination, take the control of his party away from the Clintons, lose the election and in the process drag down Democrat Senate candidates with him, thus helping the GOP win a big majority in the Senate.

Iraq then becomes the only question mark for 2004 but the economy is going well, job growth is back and historically we don’t change presidents in the middle of a war.

©2003 Mike Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman wants U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to quit his job, retiring U.S. Envoy John Danforth thinks the U.N. is not doing its job, and Pat Buchanan and conservative guru Paul Weyrich want the United States to get out of the scandal-ridden international organization.

As usual, Buchanan puts it about as bluntly as it can be put. “The enemy is not Kofi, who will become a Third World martyr if forced out in the absence of proof of personal corruption. Let him stay seated atop his compost heap until the aroma grows so great Americans demand it all be bulldozed into the East River as a public nuisance,” Buchanan wrote in his column today.

Both he and Weyrich make a good case for their demands. The oil-for-food scandal at $21 billion plus is the largest rip-off in international history and at the very least it demands that the man in charge should either quit or be tossed out – something that this gutless bunch cannot bring themselves to do despite the growing evidence that Annan’s son Kojo was up to his ears in the looting of the oil-for-food scam.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Sen. Coleman charged that Saddam Hussein defrauded the oil-for-food program of $21 billion that was supposed to go for humanitarian aid.

“We have obtained evidence that Saddam doled out lucrative oil allotments to foreign officials, sympathetic journalists and even one senior U.N. official,” he wrote. “We are gathering evidence that Saddam gave hundreds of thousands – maybe even millions – of oil-for-food dollars to terrorists and terror organizations … under the supposedly vigilant eye of the U.N.”

The “senior U.N. official” Coleman mentioned is Benon Sevan, Kofi’s hand-picked head of the oil-for-food program, who he insists “reportedly received bribes from Saddam.”

“As long as Mr. Annan remains in charge, the world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks and under-the-table payments that took place under the U.N.’s collective nose,” Coleman said.

But the scandal, as shockingly corrupt as it is, is not America’s real problem with the United Nations. That problem is the United Nation’s hostility to the concept of national sovereignty. Deep in its collective breast the United Nations believes it should be the world’s ultimate authority and all nations should bow before it.

As Pat Buchanan put it, the United Nation’s hidden agenda - the International Criminal Court, (ICC) the World Trade Organization and the Kyoto Protocol - is to curtail America’s freedom to act in its own interests and to create a world government erected on a one-man, one-nation, one-vote principle.

Buchanan notes that under a one-world government, India and China, with 2.5 billion people, would be the dominant powers. “Global democracy,” he warns, “is the death of the West.”

“With the idea of global governance out of the closet, with the European Union the model – with the United Nations the embryo – the real threat to America comes into view: a loss of sovereignty and eventually the loss of independence.”

Indeed, the United Nation has proven to be especially hostile to America’s refusal to surrender our sovereignty in such matters as the International Criminal Court (ICC) which would have overridden the Constitutional rights of Americans and subjected us to the jurisdiction of a foreign judicial body had not President Bush wisely revoked the treaty signed by former President Clinton embracing the authority of the ICC.

I agree with Senator Coleman – Kofi Annan must go. And I agree with Pat Buchanan and Paul Weyrich: it’s time for the U.S. to quit this toothless organization of corrupt, power-hungry bureaucrats.

I like the way Paul Weyrich put it: “The current U.N. cannot live without the United States. We pay about a quarter of its budget and for what? To have us slapped down by a group of bloodthirsty dictators who hate our system of government? To have human rights abuses investigated by a committee composed of the worst human rights violators on the face of the earth? To have U.N. people run for cover as soon as the situation gets tough in Iraq? For the life of me I can’t figure out any benefit to staying in the U.N.”

Neither can I.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

To listen to the more demented segments of the media and the Democrats, President Bush’s Thanksgiving day visit to the troops in Baghdad was a cynical “stunt.” But Hillary Clinton’s visit to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, was an act of the “compassion” for which the woman the American Spectator’s Bob Tyrrell used to call “Bruno,” is so famous.

To accept that notion, one has to overlook the reaction of the troops to the two visits, but then overlooking inconvenient facts is one of the things our super-liberal media does best.

When George Bush strode into that gigantic mess hall our service men and women rose as one and cheered lustily. On the other hand, if you look at the expressions on the faces of the troops forced to wait for their Thanksgiving dinner while Mrs. Clinton and her party chowed down, there appears to be a lack of enthusiasm, giving one to wonder about the accuracy of her statement that the folks in uniform, as she put it, were thrilled to have “myself” in their midst.

Then, of course, there is the matter of what the two visitors had to say. President Bush paid homage to the men and women serving in harm’s way and expressed the nation’s thanks for their sacrifices. Mrs. Clinton, as she is wont to do, spent must of her time bad mouthing the president and his administration, and the conduct of the war in Iraq the troops are waging.

President Bush has refused to inject himself into the question of adding more troops to the coalition forces, noting that the matter of troop strength is something best left to the commanders in the field who are better equipped to address such questions.

Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, drew on her vast knowledge of military affairs and declared that the numbers of troops in Iraq must be increased. She seems to have forgotten a couple of important factors: first that the U.S. Armed forces are already stretched thin all around the world, and secondly that the reason they are is the fact that under her husband’s administration the armed forces were decimated.

The fact of the matter is, that between 1992 and 2000, the Clinton Administration cut national defense by more than half a million personnel and $50 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. As the Heritage Foundation reported, by the time President Bush took office the Army alone had lost four active divisions and two Reserve divisions. The number of total active personnel in the Air Force had decreased by nearly 30 percent. In the Navy, the total number of ships had decreased from around 393 ships in the fleet in 1992 to 316 today. Even the Marines had lost 22,000 personnel.

Yet Mrs. Clinton can’t seem to grasp the fact that to increase the numbers of troops in Iraq, you have to have the numbers at home to accomplish that. Thanks to her husband, we don’t. We are reduced to calling up reserves to do the jobs the regulars we lost under Clinton would be doing.

Another interesting difference between the two visits – President Bush has never ceased to express his admiration for the men and women who wear American uniforms. But Mrs. Clinton and her husband have never made any secret of the fact that they loathe the U.S. military.

America’s men and women know full well that they are loved by President Bush. And they also know from past experience that Mrs. Clinton and her husband actually despise them.

Most fair minded observers have noted the courage it took for President Bush to risk life and limb by going into an active war zone and land at an airport where another plane just days before was hit by a ground to air missile.

But Mrs. Clinton also showed courage. After all, given the dismal record the Clintons compiled vis-à-vis the armed forces and their well known derisive views of them, it must have been a scary experience for her to put herself in their midst.

©2003 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

Kweisi Mfume is leaving his job as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and his resignation should be a source of rejoicing for not only the membership of that civil rights organization, but for all Americans black and white.

For all of the nine years he has served as the NAACP’s head, Mfume has been one of the nation’s most divisive voices. Under his leadership the NAACP has become nothing less than a rabid race-baiting group. During his presidency I have heard little else from Mfume other than his incessant repetition of the canard that every problem plaguing the world, and the black community in particular, can be blamed on white America.

Along with Jesse Jackson, Mfume has refused to face the real problem from which their African-American brothers and sisters are suffering, and it isn’t solved by blaming everything on slavery. The issue is fatherless homes. And their failure to speak out about children being born out of wedlock should not be surprising; neither one of them has the credibility to discuss it, both being guilty of fathering children out of wedlock.

So rather than talk about that burning issue, they rant and rave about the white man’s guilt for slavery, an issue settled over a century and a half ago, when hundreds of thousands of white men died to put an end to it.

If the NAACP has any hope of really advancing the prospects and the welfare of the black community, it has to stop blaming white America and start facing the problem of kids growing up without the love and guidance of a father in their homes. And they need to have a leader who has both the credibility and the courage to tackle that issue head-on. One who won’t blame whitey and will tell black America to look in the mirror and ask what they can do to help their own people and be honest about the issue of fatherless homes much in the way as Bill Cosby has been honest with his fellow African-Americans.

Cosby chastises the African-American community for its rates of juvenile delinquency, its parenting, the coarse language of its youth. You can do better, he tells his fellow blacks. Don’t let yourself be victims, and especially don’t let the poorest in the community let themselves be victims.

“This is about little children … and people not giving them better choices,” he told Paula Zahn in an interview for CNN’s Paula Zahn Now. “Talking. Talking. Parenting. Correctly parenting. That’s what it’s about. And you can’t blame other things. You got to — you got to straighten up your house. Straighten up your apartment. Straighten up your child.”

Getting this across is not an easy job, as the courageous Cosby has learned. None of us wants to face reality, to look at ourselves as we really are. It’s easier to play victim, and the Mfumes and the Jacksons have been all too ready to help convince black America of their victimhood. And it keeps the money rolling in.

The victim’s mantra goes like this: “It’s comforting for us to avoid taking responsibility for our self-created problems by proclaiming that that we are the way we are because of you. We are way we are because of what happened in the 19th century. It’s not because we lived in a fatherless home and there was no strong hand to help raise us. We are what we are because somebody to whom we might be related to was once enslaved.”

And what Mfume’s NAACP has done is to foster that lie. It’s time to do a makeover and replace the “blame whitey” chorus of the Mfumes and Jacksons and Al Sharptons with the Bill Cosbys and get people who understand what Bill Cosby is saying and act on it.

If the NAACP really wants to empower the advancement of African Americans they’ll find leaders who have the best interests of their fellow blacks and are willing to raise their voices to help the black community face and solve their own problems.

I have a couple of candidates. How about replacing Mfume with Bill Cosby or Jesse Lee Peterson from BOND or even Colin Powell who’s about to be at large. They have the credibility and the guts to face the problem head-on.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

Note to the 10 Demodwarfs now running for president: Get off your knees, boys, God isn’t going to answer your prayers for a rip-roaring recession. The good times are rolling.

And the way it looks now, they are going to keep rolling – that is unless one of you by some miracle gets elected and keeps his promise to repeal the Bush tax cuts, thereby sending the economy into a tailspin.

The latest figure is astounding – a growth rate of 8.2 percent in the July-to-September quarter is the fastest growth in nearly twenty years. It must feel like a dagger in the Democrats’ hearts. Here they’ve been ranting about the alleged worst economy since poor old Herbert Hoover’s days and griping about tax cuts for the rich and, oh, the injustice of it all!. And then without warning it’s morning in America again.

Look at the figures: new orders for “durable” goods rose by 3.3 percent last month, up from the 2.1 percent rise in September and consumer spending remained steady in October, with Americans’ incomes jumping a healthy 0.4 percent. Moreover, new claims for unemployment insurance benefits dropped last week by a seasonally adjusted 11,000 to 351,000, the lowest level since January 2001.

Think of it. All of a sudden the sluggish economy skyrockets, hitting a plateau we haven’t seen since 1984 when my dad was in office. And it got to that point then in the same way President Bush has gotten us there now, and the same way President Kennedy also got us there in his presidency – by slashing taxes.

According to the National Association for Business Economics a panel of 28 forecasters from various industries predicted that the overall economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, will grow by 4.5 percent in 2004. Should that forecast pan out, it would produce the fastest GDP growth rate in 20 years, since the economy jumped 7.3 percent in 1984 under Ronald Reagan.

“We are looking for a very strong bounceback,” NABE President Duncan Meldrum, chief economist at Air Products & Chemicals Inc. of Allentown, Pa. told the Associated Press.

And to what do the experts give the credit for this economic boom? The tax cuts and low interest rates. “We just have an unprecedented amount of economic stimulus coming from Washington to boost economic activities,” Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo in Minneapolis told the AP. “That is going to keep economic activity at very high levels.”

So how do the Democrats deal with all this bad news? They harp on the fiction that the tax cuts now putting a head of steam in the economy and creating jobs were solely for the benefit of the so-called rich. And so some are pledging that if they get back in power they will kill the tax-cut goose that lays all these golden eggs by repealing the very measure that has produced a growth rate of 8.2 percent and all those other economic blessings.

They keep harping on the same old deceptive tax-cuts-for-the-rich theme. But they don’t bother telling the American people who the rich are. They conjure up visions of bloated fat cats lolling around on their yachts, drinking champagne and laughing at all those poor suckers who pay taxes while thanks to President Bush they pocket the proceeds of the tax cuts enacted solely for their benefit.

The truth is that the top 50 percent of wage earners are those individuals or couples filing jointly who earned just $26,000 and more in 1999. They pay 96.03 percent of all taxes. And the bottom 50 percent pays a mere 3.97 percent of all income taxes. The top 5 percent pay 53.25 percent of all income taxes, the top 10 percent pay 64.89 percent and the top 25 percent pay 82.9 percent.

The top 1 percent were those who earned $293,000 or more. So who are the rich? The government says they are people making $100,000 or more. And those making over $200,000 will on average pay approximately $99,000 in income taxes.

About all the Democrats have left now, is their old strategy of class warfare, and mark my words, in November next year they’ll discover that it doesn’t work any more.

The Clinton 1992 slogan “It’s the economy stupid,” is truer today than it was then – and it’s now the Democrats’ worst nightmare.

Mike Reagan, the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Premiere Radio Network. Comments to [email protected] for Mike.

©2003 Mike Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

A handful of courageous House members have taken on the powers-that-be in Washington, including their own president and the GOP House leadership, in a valiant effort to protect Americans from the dangers posed by wide-open borders now serving as an open door for illegal immigrants or al Qaeda terrorists to enter the United States.

Instead of shutting down those borders to illegals and terrorists, the government has done everything but put up welcoming signs along our southern borders, and provide relief stations every mile or so to refresh tired and thirsty illegals as they wend their way across the borders into the U.S., where politicians from both parties strive to help them feel wanted and give them driver’s licenses and all kinds of welfare goodies.

As the media have gone out of their way to publicize the efforts to block a bill to revamp our intelligence services, misinforming the American people by blaming Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for allegedly using his influence to block the bill – a totally unproven allegation - the reasons why some top Republicans are fighting to prevent the bill’s passage as currently written are all but ignored.

Standing firm against the Senate-House Conference Committee report on the bill in its current form are Representatives James Sensenbrenner - R-Wis., Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and Duncan Hunter -R-Cal, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee.

They killed a last-second deal last Saturday to pass stalled legislation to create a new national intelligence director and national counter-terrorism center. The overhaul was supposed to help the intelligence community track terrorist threats and was one of the biggest legislative priorities of this year.

According to the Boston Globe, Rep. Hunter cited Pentagon concerns that the realignment of intelligence authority could interfere with the military chain of command and endanger troops in the field while Sensenbrenner demanded that the bill also deal with counterterrorism laws and illegal immigration.

Sensenbrenner opposes the current bill on the wholly legitimate grounds that it does not include measures to prevent states from giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, among other equally objectionable gestures to political correctness. He points out the fact that 19 of the 9/11 hijackers had a total of 63 driver’s licenses among them generously handed out by various states, which allowed them to move freely around the country plotting their deadly mission.

According to a memo from the House Armed Services Committee, the bill threatens to disrupt the critical relationships between the intelligence services and our combat troops. It would render our troops vulnerable by not providing clear and unambiguous delineation of authority between the intelligence bureaucracy in Washington and the existing chain of command.

Sensenbrenner warns that the U.S. must toughen our asylum laws to prevent people from entering the U.S. and claiming asylum which would allow them to be free to live here while at large and free to plan terrorist attacks while awaiting an immigration hearing, which can take years to process.

The fact is that this bill does nothing to protect our borders which it originally did in compliance with page 390 of the 9/11 commission report before the Senate got its delicate fingers on it and stripped the provisions from the bill the House passed. The House bothered to read that report but the Senate threw it away because of politics. They want an open border policy because they are still kowtowing to political correctness which is going to end up killing Americans – it’s now past the time to be just plain correct, and forget the political part. Anybody who thinks the U.S. can be safe with an open border policy must be smoking strange substances.

To listen to the liberal media you’d think that America’s safety depends upon getting this bill passed now. What’s the hurry? Can’t we wait until the new Congress convenes in January, when the newly elected members of the House and Senate will get a chance to consider the measure? After all, even if the bill went through now it would not have any impact until January or later anyway.

The real issue here, distorted by the media, is that the Senate stripped out everything the House of Representatives put in to protect our borders as demanded by the 9/11 Commission report, essentially leaving our borders wide open to terrorists. The provisions must be put back and until they are, the bill must be kept in limbo.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

Are the media on our side, or are they rooting for a bunch of murderous thugs who enjoy lopping off innocent peoples’ heads? We are once again getting the answer loud and clear – to the media what the United States does in Iraq is always wrong, and the enemy is usually shown, not as a terrorist, but a victim of unwarranted U.S. aggression.

Consider the firestorm that erupted when a young U.S. Marine, wounded the day before, was videotaped in the act of shooting a so-called insurgent who may or may not have been armed or booby trapped, waiting for a chance to blow Marines and himself to kingdom come.

That videotape, filmed by an embedded NBC photographer whose photos are prominently featured on an anti-war German website, has now replaced the Abu Ghraib pictures as proof of American brutality even though the film doesn’t begin to explain the circumstances behind the incident.

But that hasn’t prevented the media from showing the film over and over again without telling the other side of the story – that the situation could well have been one of kill-or-be-killed – as happened time and again to Marines during the battle for Fallujah.

NBC, the photographer’s employer, led the pack, broadcasting the controversial footage four times an hour for two days. And the rest of the media jumped aboard. Not one of them has bothered to explain what lay behind the incident.

• As of this writing, 40 United States Marines have died while cleaning out the terrorist havens in Fallujah.

• In a single week, Marines and Army units killed as many as 1,200 of the enemy and captured 1,000 more and did this despite forfeiting the element of surprise, so civilians could escape, according to The Star newspaper.

• Along with the Marine who shot the insurgent, his comrades over more than eight days have had to endure what the Star described as “some of the toughest infantry duty imaginable, house-to-house urban fighting against an enemy that neither wears a uniform nor obeys any normal rules of war.” The newspaper cited this report from The Times of London describing how the insurgents fight:

“In the south of Fallujah yesterday, U.S. Marines found the armless, legless body of a blonde woman, her throat slashed and her entrails cut out. Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, said that she had been dead for a while, but at that location for only a day or two. The woman was wearing a blue dress; her face had been disfigured. It was unclear if the remains were the body of the Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, or of Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole abducted two weeks ago. Both were married to Iraqis and held Iraqi citizenship; both were kidnapped in Baghdad last month.”

While zeroing in on this incident, the media has largely ignored the grisly discoveries of so-called “slaughter houses” where the insurgents committed atrocities unheard of since the barbarian invasions of the West in 400 & 500 A.D.

• On Monday, 12 male corpses were found in two homes - six in a living room and another half-dozen in a bedroom - their bodies tangled together, stacked on each other.

• One of the execution rooms unearthed by the Marines - dubbed “the slaughterhouse” - was believed to have been used by Zarqawi’s terror group to behead foreign hostages, including American businessman Nicholas Berg, whose body was found in early May, Marine Lt. Col. Patrick Malay told the Star.

Yet few networks or newspapers bothered to show photos of the Fallujah slaughter pens which graphically revealed the true nature of the enemy – they were all too busy showcasing the photo of the Marine engaged in what any fair-minded person would see as a fully justifiable action.

Whose side is the media on? Not ours.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561