What happened in Pakistan today is just more proof that when it comes to the war on terrorism, the Democrats are so terribly wrong-headed that they constitute a serious threat to the security of the American people — that’s you and me.

The assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is just another message — if any more are needed — that we are involved in a global war with an enemy that has no morals, no scruples and no respect for human life.

We can expect that the message will go undelivered to the national leadership of the Democratic party, which has shown a reckless disregard to any hints that hard-headed U.S. policy vis-à-vis Islamic terrorism is right and is justified.

In stubborn resistance to reality, Congressional Democrats have steadfastly clung to the notion that the Bush administration is wrong in its determination to face the war being forced on us by worldwide Islamo-fascism and expend its energies in fighting it wherever is with all that is required.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have turned a blind eye to the true nature of the war, especially in their insistence that the war in Iraq is not part of the total war and wants us out, pronto, leaving Iraq to deal with a threat it is not yet able to deal with.

Their myopia over Iraq and the need to pursue an aggressive strategy to root out and destroy the enemy wherever he is, as we are now doing with the surge in Iraq, is not limited to that struggle. It seems that whenever tough measures are called for, they rise up in strident opposition.

Such is the case in Pakistan, where Nancy Pelosi not long ago expressed her disapproval of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s hard-line stance towards the huge radical element in his country, where polls show that fully 48 percent of the population favors al Qaeda and the Taliban.

When Musharraf imposed emergency rule and suspended his nation’s constitution in the face of massive unrest in Pakistan, Pelosi — who seems to labor under the misapprehension that among her roles is secretary of state for Capitol Hill — let loose with this broadside, pinning the blame on the Bush Administration, which she neglected to note shared her unhappiness with Musharraf’s actions, but not her stridency:

“For too long, President Musharraf failed to confront effectively his growing unpopularity” Madame Pelosi said. “The Bush Administration enabled Musharraf’s delusion by ignoring his undemocratic acts and lack of internal support in exchange for his assistance in efforts against terrorism. Pakistan will only be a reliable and capable ally against terrorism when its government is not seen as an enemy by its own people,” Pelosi added.

This in the face of that near-majority of the population that sees its government as the real enemy and supports al Qaeda, which wants to kill us all and has tried nine times to kill Pervez Musharraf, who just happens to be our sole hope of keeping order in a nuclear-armed Pakistan and preventing the horrendous Taliban from re-conquering Afghanistan.

War, as the Kennedys used to say about politics, “ain’t beanbag.” Victory does not go to the fainthearted. And like it or not, what we face in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq, and in a lot of other troubled areas of the world, is all-out war. Musharraf understands that.

Wherever we are engaged in that war the Democratic party, now thoroughly in the hands of the greatest conglomeration of fanatic far-out left-wingers in all creation, prefers to treat the struggle as if it were beanbag, where one plays by gentlemanly rules even as the enemy kills people in suicide bombings or chopping off heads.

Pakistan is not an isolated case. We are as much at war there, by proxy, as we are in Afghanistan where our troops battle the Taliban. If we lose Pakistan, al Qaeda could be the world’s ninth nuclear power, and playing the Democrats’ game of beanbag could threaten us with mushroom clouds over Manhattan.

As the Nixon folks used to say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going — if they want to survive, that is. For today’s Democrats, when the going gets tough, it’s time to wring your hands and tsk-tsk while the tough get going.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

It’s no secret that in America knowing how to speak the English language is the basic requirement for success – if you can’t speak the language everybody else speaks, you are back at the Tower of Babel wondering what everybody around you is trying to say.

For any youngster starting out in life, knowing and speaking the common language is the first step in moving up the ladder. And in the United States, English is the common language, and has been from the beginning. The Constitutional debates were conducted solely in English. Only English is spoken in Congress and in the world of business, not only here in America, in most of the world.

Bill Cosby recently spoke about the vital necessity of youths learning and speaking English.

“They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English,” he complained. “I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘why you ain’t, where you is, what he drive, where he stay, where he work, who you be’ …And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk.

“Everybody knows it’s important to speak English - except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living. People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around. The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.”

Somebody ought to read those passages to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, preferably in English. It seems that Madame Pelosi has her heart set on forcing the Salvation Army to hire workers who can’t speak English.

The lady from San Francisco, where English is presumably spoken, is set on forcing the Salvation Army and all other employers to embrace polyglot as their official hiring standard. Employers would be forced to hire workers who can’t speak a word of the language all their customers understand and use – English.

So strong is her intent in this matter that she has sought to block an amendment introduced by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., to shield the Salvation Army from an absurd requirement of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) that it must hire non-English speaking employees. His amendment passed the Senate by a 75 to 19 last month, and the House by a recent vote of 218 to 186.

“I cannot imagine that the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act intended to say that it’s discrimination for a shoe shop owner to say to his or her employee, ‘I want you to be able to speak America’s common language on the job,’ ” he told the Senate last Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Mrs. Pelosi, however, caved in to a demand from the House’s Hispanic Caucus that specified that the House will not vote on the bill funding the Justice and Commerce Departments unless the English-only protection language is dropped.

As the Journal observed, “The late Albert Shanker, head of the American Federation of Teachers, once pointed out that public schools were established in this country largely ‘to help mostly immigrant children learn the three R’s and what it means to be an American, with the hope that they would go home and teach their parents the principles in the Constitution and the Declaration that unite us.’”

The newspaper quoted Sen. Alexander as warning that this “noble effort is in danger of being undermined: We have spent the last 40 years in our country celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English.”

Somebody please translate that for Mrs. Pelosi – in English.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

It has been said that there are none so blind as those who will not see. The quote is attributed by some to Jesus (Matthew 13:13): “Therefore I speak to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand”

That’s a perfect description of Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid, both of whom disingenuously state that that there has been no sign of progress in Iraq and that we are losing the war there and must pull up stakes and run as fast as we can with our tails between our legs.

Just what kind of blinders and ear plugs are these people wearing? Don’t they realize that some of the most vehement foes of the war in Iraq such as The New York Times and the Washington Post are reporting that the surge is working and we are winning the war against al Qaeda and the other insurgents?

According to the Associated Press: “Twilight brings traffic jams to the main shopping district of this once-affluent corner of Baghdad, and hundreds of people stroll past well-stocked vegetable stands, bakeries and butcher shops. To many in America, it seems little short of a miracle.”

Wrote the Washington Post: “The number of attacks against U.S. Soldiers has fallen to levels not seen since before the February 2006 bombing of a Shi’ite shrine in Samarra that touched off waves of sectarian killing…The death toll for American troops in October fell to 39, the lowest level since March 2006.”

Finally, The New York Times, of all newspapers, noted: “American forces have routed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Iraqi militant network, from every neighborhood in Baghdad, a top American general said today, allowing American troops involved in the ‘surge’ to depart as planned.”

Could it be that Pelosi and Reid can’t see the progress because they don’t want to see it? Or, even worse, are they committed to doing what they can to stop their country from winning the war in Iraq?

Senator Joe Lieberman thinks it’s the latter. Noting that since the Democrats won control of Congress last year “the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party… Has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush… Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving.”

As Sen. Lieberman showed, it is no longer possible to deny that the Democrat leadership wants the United States to suffer a humiliating defeat in Iraq. That this would mean that if 3000-plus American soldiers and Marines who died fighting to defeat al Qaeda and their allies in Iraq have died in vain, it doesn’t seem to bother Pelosi and the Reid one little bit.

Pelosi’s reaction to coalition success was to announce what The Washington Times rightly called “her newest legislative strategy to damage the war effort.” Her House Democrats will “try to enact a bill calling for immediately beginning to withdraw U.S. Troops from Iraq, with a goal of completing the pullout in one year,” according to the Times.

That this public waving the surrender flag would signal to the al Qaeda jihadists that there would be a date certain for what amounts to a surrender to a foes now losing bothered the Democrat House leader one little bit.

If Madame Pelosi and the surrender monkeys now running the Democrat Party on Capitol Hill have their way, the jihadists in Iraq need only wait for the Democrats’ planned withdrawal to move in and take over Iraq. They call this strategy, I call it treason.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

A lot of people are scratching their heads wondering why the Rev. Pat Robertson, an ultra-conservative pro-life Republican, has thrown his support behind Rudy Giuliani, who is pro-abortion and anti-gun rights. They just can’t understand it, even though the answer to the question is simple: it’s all about money and power.

The French explain that behind most puzzling questions is a woman. “Cherchez la femme” is the way they put it – follow the woman. In America, however, when a public figure does something that seems totally out of character you can’t go wrong if you follow the money and the quest for power.

Pat Robertson is about money. Pat Robertson is about business. He looks at the contest for the Republican presidential nomination and he asks who the candidate is most likely to stop the Hillary train from roaring into the White House.

He’s fully aware that if Hillary wins the presidency, his businesses throughout the world – not just The 700 Club – and everything he stands for could be in absolute jeopardy. He knows what Hillary thinks about his operations. In backing Giuliani, he’s trying to protect his many interests because he thinks Rudy is the GOP candidate most likely to beat Hillary. To his mind, Rudy is the lesser of two evils.

I’m sure he said to himself, “Sure, Rudy is pro-choice and for gay rights and licensing of guns, and all these liberal issues but look at Mitt Romney, he’s a Mormon, a member of a cult.”

I think he understood that many conservative Christians oppose Romney exactly because he is a Mormon and would be more upset if he were to back Mitt instead of Rudy.

As far as the other conservative in the race — Fred Thompson, the sentimental favorite — Pat Robertson recognizes that he’s going nowhere. He’s failed to light any fires among conservatives. After all, Pat Robertson was once a candidate for the GOP nomination himself years ago, and he knows what it takes to win and he knows that Thompson doesn’t have it.

Taking all this into account, Pat Robertson sees Giuliani rising in the polls, Hillary slipping, Romney lagging back in the national polls, and apparently concludes that Giuliani is a winner and he wants to be on Rudy’s side when he reaches the Oval Office.

The same applies to the people backing Hillary. They know how vindictive the Clintons are and how vindictive the Democrats are, and they understand what will happen to them is they don’t get behind Hilary now, when it counts, and not after she wins when their backing would be meaningless.

The bottom line is there is always the fear that if you get on the wrong side when it counts, you’ll be frozen out when it comes to sharing in the spoils.

This is what Pat Robertson is showing us by getting behind Rudy now, still early in the game. In Robertson’s opinion, Rudy will go all the way, and he wants to be at the winner’s side when he enters the winner’s circle.

He knows that the guy who gets there first – the guy who gets on the train when it leaves the station — is the guy who gets the most when it gets where it’s going.

Now all he has to do is explain why he’s backing a man who stands opposed to just about every moral issue of vital importance to most Christians. He’s going to have to explain how he can back a man who is stubbornly pro-choice, who supports gay marriage and sanctuary cities and opposes Second Amendment rights to gun ownership.

That question will be put to Pat Robertson, not Rudy Giuliani, because Rudy is not changing his position. Pat Robertson, on the other hand, is making a 180-degree turn from his vehement opposition to Rudy’s stand on the moral issues.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Robertson answers those inevitable questions.

The real answer, of course, is that after Rudy wins the election he will be able to say, “Rudy, I brought the Christian community in when Dr. Dobson and all the other Christian community leaders were chasing them away from you, and now you owe me big time.”

And he can look at the defeated Hillary and say, “You don’t scare me one little bit.”

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696 7561.

Listen Barack Obama, John Edwards and all you other soon-to-be also-rans, lay off Hillary. She’s well on her way to winning the nomination and we don’t want anything to stand in her way, especially attacks on her character and integrity that might sidetrack her on the way to being your party’s standard bearer.

So leave her alone, let her cruise her way to the nomination so we Republicans can have the pleasure of dissecting her in the general election campaign.

And she is about as dissectible as a politician can get, starting with her health care reform fiasco, her sleazy involvement in the White House travel office firings, her use of private detectives to smear and harass the women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct, and her most recent campaign finance shenanigans.

I know that many of you fear that Hillary’s truckload of negatives will not only kill her chances of winning next year, but will also carry a lot of your colleagues down to defeat in 2008. I can understand why you are finally beginning to go after her – deep down inside you realize she’s your worst nightmare come true. With your party’s prospects for winning the presidency and increasing you numbers in Congress about as bright as they’ve ever been you don’t want anything to upset the apple cart.

Here’s how The Washington Post put it in an Associated Press story on August 12.

“Democratic leaders quietly fret that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at the top of their 2008 ticket could hurt candidates at the bottom. They say the former first lady may be too polarizing for much of the country. She would jeopardize the party’s standing with independent voters and give Republicans who otherwise might stay home on Election Day a reason to vote.”

The story goes on to report: “The problem is her political baggage: A whopping 49 percent of the public says they have an unfavorable view of Clinton compared to 47 percent who say they hold her in high regard, according to a Gallup Poll survey Aug. 3-5.”

Right on! So you can see why we Republicans want to have the honor of exploiting the lady’s negatives for all the world to see. She likes to boast that she has faced the worst the so-called Republican attack machine can throw at her and has survived. Let me tell you, she ain’t seen nothing yet. We have long memories and a huge arsenal of ammunition to fire at her when the time comes.

Want a sample of her negatives? Here’s a bit from Ana Marie Cox’s blog a year ago last August: “The Boston Herald reports on what ‘ordinary, grass-roots Democrats’ think about Hillary Clinton: ‘Lying B**** . . . Shrew . . . Machiavellian . . . Evil, power-mad witch . . . The ultimate self-serving politician. . . Criminal . . . Megalomaniac . . . Fraud . . . Dangerous . . . Devil incarnate . . . Satanic . . . Power freak.’”

And that’s from Democrats!

I know you Democrats don’t want to do us Republicans any favors, but just this once let us have our way. Give us the opportunity to give the Republican attack machine another shot at Hillary Clinton. Let her coast to victory in the primaries. Then we’ll take it from there.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

It was inevitable – a huge swath of Southern California was ablaze in one of the worst wildfires in the state’s history, yet all that gasbag liberals could do in the face of this disaster was to go looking for someone to blame.

While hundreds of heroic firefighters risk life and limb to save as many homes as possible, and state and federal disaster officials bend every effort to put in place all the firefighting assets available to them, the likes of Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and their allies scurry to use this immense tragedy to make political capital out of it.

Reid was bad enough, dredging up the specter of imagined global warming to explain why California was burning, but Sen. Boxer outdid him by reaching down into her bag of slime to blame the fact that the fires were beyond the control of firefighters on the war in Iraq and the fact that many California National Guardsmen were involved there on the firing line and not at home on the fire lines.

They ignore a few salient facts, such as the reality that California is a bone-dry desert filled with highly flammable undergrowth and subject to a phenomenon known as Santa Ana winds, which at this time of the year tend to come roaring down the valleys towards heavily populated areas, ready to spread the fires that inevitably erupt in the fall months.

Given those facts, it is easy to understand — if you want to understand – why, from time to time, this tinderbox of an area is given to destructive wildfires.

But the partisan liberals who infest the political arena in California don’t want to understand, and they certainly don’t want you to understand these simple facts. They want to use such natural disasters to fan the flames of anger at the president and anybody else who doesn’t share their ultra left-wing views and agenda.

What they want most, however, is to direct your attention away from the real culprits – their ardent supporters among the environmentalist extremists, whose agenda they fully support and sanction through laws they enact at every opportunity.

A major reason why the fires spread so quickly was the universal presence of all those dead trees, tinderbox-dry underbrush, assorted weeds and all-but-dead grass that has been allowed to exist because the preventive controlled burning of this flammable material has been stopped dead in its tracks by the tree huggers and spotted owl-lovers who routinely put critters above humans.

Without all that ready-to-ignite material, the fires would never have been able to gobble up thousands of acres and reduce thousands of homes to smoking rubble. It seems that to the wackos who dominate both the extremist environmentalist movement and the controlling left wing of the Democrat party, human habitats are less important than owl nests.

Notice that neither Mr. Gore nor his environmentalist friends who are so worried about saving the trees have arrived on the fire lines with even a thimbleful of water to douse the flames. Instead they stand far off, tut-tutting about the horror of it all, blaming global warming, President Bush and the Iraq war for a tragedy to which they so abundantly contributed.

Thanks largely to their efforts to stop fire-preventive controlled burning for the past 20 years, they may have saved a few spotted owls, but the thousands of people who lost their homes paid the price for their victory over common-sense preventive measures.

The very warmth and dry climate that all but guarantee wildfire outbreaks are the exact reasons why people live here. And recurrent wildfires that threaten their homes and their lives are the price they pay to escape the harshness of winter and the summertime humidity that plague much of the nation. All through the winter there is a huge influx of people from colder climates coming here to enjoy a warm, dry climate.

Californians understand this. They know the fires will come. It’s the price nature makes them pay and when the bill arrives they shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. Most of all, they don’t scurry around looking for somebody to blame. They are adults.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

In 2006 Nancy Pelosi promised the American people that if they would vote to give Democrats control of Congress, making her Speaker of the House, they would come to Washington and “drain the swamp.”

More than a year later, Democrats have converted the alleged Republican swamp into a vast pit of quicksand into which America’s national and financial security are slowly sinking.

Democrats chortle over the president’s dismal 24 percent popularity rating, but they have to look up to see it from their own popularity rating of a tiny 11 percent.

Madame Speaker, once hailed by the media and her fellow Democrats as a shrewd politician who would turn her tenure as the first woman to occupy the Speaker’s chair into a stellar performance, has been revealed as a bumbling San Francisco-style far-out liberal Democrat with nary a notion as to what this nation really stands for.

Despite their protests to the contrary, her party has revealed itself to be Marxist in every sense of the word. Without exception, the social programs they espouse are rooted in socialist doctrines. They distrust the American people to manage their own affairs without the deadly hand of the federal government gripping them by the shoulders and draining their wallets.

No matter what the problem, they have two approaches to solve it – spending vast amounts of money on socialist-style solutions, and paying for them by raising taxes — allegedly on the “rich,” who appear in Democrat eyes to be any family earning more than $50 a week.

That, however, is not the most obvious result of the voters’ decision to oust the Republicans from control of Capitol Hill (a fate they brought upon themselves by acting like wild-spending Democrats). It’s the revelation that the Democrat majority is absolutely incompetent and totally unfit to govern any nation.

You need look no further than the Speaker Pelosi’s willingness to poke a sharp stick into the eyes of one of America’s closest allies in the war on terror, and one of our strongest supporters, Turkey.

Ignoring the fact that Turkish support is vital to our troops in Iraq, the madam of the House threw her full weight behind a resolution to condemn Turkey for something that happened nearly a century ago, and in which not a single living being in Turkey had any part.

Why? Simply because it would please a voting bloc in Mrs. Pelosi’s home state.

Fortunately, a number of her fellow House Democrats suddenly realized that she was leading them into the quicksand, and saner heads seem to be prevailing as Pelosi’s political turkey heads for the chopping block.

This, however, is symptomatic of the problem of handing power to the current Leftist-dominated Democrat party, which has a two-pronged approach to governing the nation: do everything possible to win elections by satisfying certain various voting blocs no matter how much their policies threaten the safety and security of the American people, and move as far to the left as possible without revealing their total dedication to the coercive policies of Karl Marx.

To put it simply, this party is wholly owned by the unhinged George Soros left, the teachers’ unions, big labor bosses, trial lawyers, and assorted pie-in-the-sky liberals shaking in their boots over the imagined threat that Earth and everyone on it is in the process being barbecued by Mother Nature.

In an effort to mollify the rabid anti-war left that wants us out of Iraq now — no matter what the dreadful consequences for world peace and an oil-dependent world economy — the Democrat Congressional leadership has sought to have it both ways: make loud noises about ending the war, while throwing up their hands and telling all those nuts in San Francisco that they are at the mercy of big, bad George Bush who is using his massive 24 percent popularity to tie their hands and frustrate their efforts to cut and run.

I won’t argue that the Republicans didn’t deserve to have their ears pinned back in 2006, but who knew that in getting rid of one crew of Washington insiders the nation was put in the hands of the gang that can’t shoot straight, or even figure out which end of the gun to point.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

Tuesday night’s debate between the Republican candidates for the GOP presidential nomination showed once again why the majority of conservatives can’t get excited over any of the current hopefuls.

Widely touted by the media as show-and-tell time for Fred Thompson – as the appearance that would make or break his candidacy – all that emerged from his corner was an acceptable performance, neither hot nor cold.

He showed that he has a good grasp of the economic facts, but there was none of that fire that Republicans crave to see in their standard bearer. He didn’t damage himself, but he didn’t set himself above his rivals either.

On the subject of the debate — the economy — Duncan Hunter showed the best grasp of the facts, especially the trade issue, while Thompson basically spoke in platitudes on the subject.

Over all, the debate showed there is not one candidate the voters can look at and say, “This is the guy we want to run the country.”

The only real misstep was Mitt Romney’s statement about going first to his attorneys if he had to go to war against Iran. He could learn a lesson from my father. He didn’t go to his attorneys when he had to attack Grenada and Libya. He went to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He knew you can’t sue your way to victory.

Mitt is a great and accomplished statesman, but his problem is that he looks too darn good. People suspect that there has to be something wrong with anybody who looks and acts that perfectly. Unfortunately, he comes across as a smooth salesman trying to sell you something you don’t need.

He should mess up his hair and look a little bit disheveled or he’ll remind people of the Democrat’s carefully coiffed pretty boy, John Edwards.

As Ann Coulter wrote in her new book, the best-qualified of all the candidates is Rep. Duncan Hunter. During the debate he was the candidate who provided the best information about the economy and had a first-rate suggestion of what we need to do.

He keyed in on what must be one of the most important economic issues – trade.

He talked about our shocking $800 billion trade deficit, and what the Chinese are doing to us. Duncan understands that when anybody cites Ronald Reagan as a free-trade advocate in defense of our present trade policies, they need to remember that in my dad’s playbook, protection of the American people came before anything else.

Take the case of Harley-Davidson. My father protected this American manufacturer of motorcycles against lower-priced Japanese imports. When he acted in behalf of an American company, Kawasaki and Honda reacted by moving their plants to the U.S. and created American jobs for American workers.

His policy was so successful that although he gave five years of protective tariffs to Harley-Davison, they didn’t even need that long a time before they could turn their company around. Given a level playing field they proved their superiority as an American manufacturer.

Ronald Reagan did the same thing with semiconductors, and the auto and steel industries. He also forced the Japanese and others to open up their markets to American products so that trade would be fair. When that didn’t happen he would impose tariffs on those products coming into the U.S., thus protecting American manufacturers.

Sure, he was a free trader who wanted too open up trade, but he always sought first to protect the sovereignty of the United States and its manufacturing base. He did not confuse free trade with giving the store away.

The effects of our current trade policies and the horrendous trade deficit they have produced are a gun pointed at the heart of our economy, and the Republican who can stand up and tell the truth about this problem and its solutions will be the one who emerges from the pack.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

Nothing frightens those who peddle lies than the cold hard light of truth. They react to exposure of their deceits the way vampires react to a having a crucifix held up in front of them.

Ever since the birth of conservative talk radio and the Internet ended the liberals’ total monopoly over the news, the left has been simmering with impotence — over the loss of their absolute control over what the Americans are allowed to see and hear, and their inability to do anything about it.

Time and again liberal attempts to sell the nation their shoddy goods have been frustrated when talk-radio hosts have taken to the airwaves and warned their millions of listeners that they were about to be taken to the cleaners.

It was not until the administration’s fatally flawed immigration reform bill that seemed destined for passage was derailed by army of angry voters recruited by talk radio hosts and conservative Internet Web sites that the left understood both the incredible power of the new media and their utter helplessness in the face of it.

Clearly something had do be done, they thought. So the left, led by the slimy Media Matters organization, began a counterattack using the liberals’ favorite weapon – the lie.

An innocuous remark by Fox’s Bill O’Reilly praising a famous Harlem restaurant was taken out of context by the liberal mainstream media which tried to ignite a firestorm, but the public wasn’t buying.

Then, when Rush Limbaugh spoke about men falsely claiming to be veterans of the Iraq war such as one, Jesse MacBeth, who told a pack of lies about his non-existent service in Iraq and whose deception had already been exposed days earlier by ABC’s Charlie Gibson and Brian Ross, the left jumped on Rush falsely claiming that his attack on such phony soldiers was an attack on all Iraq war vets who criticize the war.

As Fox’s John Gibson said: “When MoveOn stepped on its own toes sliming Gen. Petraeus, [David] Brock of Media Matters swung into action looking for a conservative who would say something that could take the focus off MoveOn.

“Enter Rush Limbaugh and the ‘phony soldier’ discussion.” As Gibson noted, Media Matters was so anxious to get the stink off MoveOn they made up the Rush controversy.

It was a patently obvious lie – few Americans have been more supportive of the U.S. military than Rush Limbaugh – and, shamefully, Democrats such as Sen. Harry Reid who had to know how false the charge was, quickly bought into it.

The whole incident shows just how desperate the liberals have become. Without the new media to keep an eye on them, their failure to accomplish their stated goals since winning control of the Congress would have been covered up by the subservient mainstream media.

Those of us in talk radio and the Internet are the left’s worst nightmare – our monitoring of their activities had been shining the light of truth on their attempts to deceive the nation, and their current assault on the new media is failing as a result.

Like all Marxists, the liberals won’t stop trying to lie their way into power. As a result, they won’t stop trying to destroy the new media. First it was Bill O’Reilly, then it was Rush Limbaugh and who knows who’ll be next – Laura Ingraham, Mike Savage, me?

You can be certain they’ll find a new target, and just as certain that they’ll keep pushing for a new “fairness doctrine” or some other way to silence the opposition. And you can be certain that whatever target they pick they’ll be lying through their teeth when they attack.

They can’t help themselves. The truth is not in them.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley; e-mail [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

Those wonderful folks in Congress who say the world is about to be roasted on the global warming spit have some great ideas on how to stop Mother Nature from barbecuing us and they even have plans on how to pay for the weapons against climate change.

They’ll make you pay for it while they get rich.

Forget the fact that the whole man-made global warming theory is a gigantic scam with not a shred of genuine scientific evidence to prove it. Instead, follow the money trail to get an idea of what it’s all about. And what it’s all about is money – the big bucks the disciples of Al Gore will rake in, and the big bucks you’ll have to pay to finance this incredible con game.

Democrat Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, let the cat out of the bag the other day when he told the American people: “I’m trying to have everybody understand that this is going to cost and that it’s going to have a measure of pain that you’re not going to like.”

Dingell’s bottom line: “This is going to cause pain.”

Among his proposals according to the Associated Press (AP):

A 50-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline and jet fuel — phased in over five years — on top of existing taxes.

A tax on carbon, at $50 a ton, released from burning coal, petroleum or natural gas. The AP notes that a carbon tax would boost the cost of everything from the cost of electricity to winter heating and gasoline and other motor fuels. Economists say a cap on carbon also would raise these costs as burning fossil fuels becomes more expensive

Phase-out of the interest tax deduction on home mortgages for homes over 3,000 square feet. Owners would keep most of the deduction for homes at the lower end of the scale, but it would be eliminated entirely for homes of 4,200 feet or more.

He estimates that would affect 10 percent of homeowners. He says “it’s only fair” to tax those who dare to buy large suburban houses and create urban sprawl. People, I might add, such as Al Gore and John Edwards who occupy palatial mansions amongst leafy glades.

Why such punitive measures? As Walter Williams wrote in Wednesday’s Investor’s Business Daily Thursday: “Despite increasing evidence that man-made CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas and contributor to climate change, politicians and others who wish to control our lives must maintain that it is.”

The reason? There’s great gobs of money to be made from the sale of the climate change snake-oil remedies.

Al Gore, for example, has become a multi-millionaire selling his brand of snake oil. Big business is lining up the get its share of your tax money extorted from you to pay to fight a non-existent threat, members of Congress are getting ready to legislate anti-climate-change programs to fund projects in their districts, and scientists are living off huge grants to study global warming.

According to Williams, buying into the global warming hysteria allows politicians to do just about anything, upon which they can muster a majority vote, in the name of fighting climate change as a means to raise taxes.

He cites Rep. David L. Hobson, R-Ohio, who has already secured $500,000 for a geothermal demonstration project and Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., who got $500,000 for a fuel-cell project by Superprotonic, a Pasadena company started by Caltech scientists. Money for similar boondoggles is being called for by members of both parties.

Then there’s NASA’s hysterical James Hanson, the media’s favorite climate change alarmist who Williams reveals was financed by ultra lefty George Soros. Wrote Williams: “James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely ‘NASA whistleblower’ standing up to the mighty U.S. Government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute , which gave him ‘legal and media advice.’ That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship ‘philanthropy,’ to the tune of $720,000.”

Ironically, in their headlong rush to get their hands on some of the snake-oil money, the climate change hucksters are passing up a chance to get their hands on a cool $125,000.

In their Ultimate Global Warming challenge, Steven Malloy’s JunkScience.com says $125,000 will be awarded to the first person to prove, in a scientific manner, that humans are causing harmful global warming.

The challenge has gone unanswered for the last 52 days.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.