Ron Reagan & the angels that saved his life

Ronald Reagan was a B-grade movie actor, an amiable dolt who somehow stumbled into politics and ended up being president. That scenario would probably make a good Hollywood movie, but nobody would believe it!

Supporters of Ron have long pointed to his religious faith as an example of what a nice guy he was.

But that religious faith was not much in evidence during his movie career - which ended rather sadly, as you may recall - with Ron hawking for GE on TeeVee. At the time, nobody knew he had faith in anything except his good looks.


Worldnetdaily, the wingnut "news" source of Joseph Farah, reports on a book written by Mary Beth Brown in 2004 called "Hand of Providence: The Strong and Quiet Faith of Ronald Reagan."

Brown claims that on two occasions, angels interceded to save ol' Ron's life. In 1981 after he had been shot by John Hinckley, Reagan was finding it difficult to breathe, had turned very pale, and things weren't looking too good.

"Reagan later recalled looking up from the gurney and praying. Half-conscious, he realized someone was holding his hand."

"'It was a soft, feminine hand,' he writes in his autobiography, 'An American Life.'"

Reagan's family tried to find out the name of the nurse who held his hand, without success. So his children decided it must have been an angel.

But that wasn't the first time Reagan experienced an angelic presence. Many years before, while working on a move with Shirley Temple, he caught pneumonia and became quite ill. He found it difficult to breathe and told the nurse he was too tired to breathe, but she insisted and he continued breathing through the night to please the nurse.

The family set out to find this nurse, but without success. It must have been an angel, family members concluded.


Yup. Mary Beth Brown believes that the key to Reagan's "astonishingly successful presidency" was his "deep Christian faith." And angels.

Oh, stop laughing. Just because he damn near ruined the country!


Haven't we had enough of presidents who talk to God, believe angels hold their hand, who then proceed to shred the Constitution, and bring us to the brink of financial destruction?


The Worldnetdaily article is here.

Trickle down, just one more time?

[Image from stoneofakind.com]

The trickle down theory: helping the rich help the economy

I'd be the first to admit I'm not an economist, but I can't help observing how certain economic ideas have played out in our country's recent history.

Consider this business of helping the rich.

Geoff Colvin, writing in the February 2 edition of Fortune magazine, suggests that's exactly how President Obama should design his economic plan. Stimulus plans, tax rebates, and increasing the capital gains and dividend taxes on people earning more than $250K a year, just won't do it, says Colvin. While they may provide a short-term boost, they won't succeed in the long-term.

Here's Colvin's idea: "Let's help corporations and the rich."

Why would we want to do that? Because we all want to create jobs and increase investment, and those things come from "companies and the wealthy."

Now, that doesn't mean we just hand out checks to very rich people. "Rather than spending more, our plutocrats need to invest more, since private investment creates long-term jobs. So let's offer high earners the very modest help of just leaving them alone..."

Oh, one other thing: we need to reduce our corporate income tax, which says Colvin [untruthfully] is "among the world's highest."

Colvin sums up his ideas by referring to that late great, but very sleepy president, Ronald Reagan. The initiatives he proposes "could be parts of what will surely be the most ambitious economic program since Ronald Reagan's first term."


Yeah? And we all know how that turned out! What is it with these guys? They never give up. Colvin is doing nothing more than offering the same old failed "trickle down" economics that didn't work before and won't work now.