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(White House Chief of Staff and later Treasury Secretary James Baker with "friend" - coincidence? We think nope.)

Smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand, stratagems and feints - all those characterizations to sum up the Reagan Economics plan. In this interview, part of the CBS News Face The Nation series from August 15, 1982, White House Chief of Staff, later appointed Treasury Secretary James Baker is asked point blank about the wildly varying opinions on the economic state and on the deficit.

George Herman (CBS News): “When do you personally think the deficit may be below $100 billion?”.

James Baker: “Well George, the official figure is of course is what I gave you and I recognize there are differences of opinion with respect to that. I think the point is that . .is that these ballooning deficits that we see are the reason why it is very important that the Congress implement the budget resolution that’s before it and it’s very . . .this is the reason it’s very important that we have a tax bill and that tax bill pass the Congress. Now, it’s really not important when I personally think the deficit might be below $100 billion. In the first place, I’m not an economist, and I really don’t have any independent view of that. The important thing, I think is that we need to constantly keep our eye on the fact that deficits are a major problem in this country. And that the ever expanding size of these deficits keeps interests rates up. And the fact that interest rates are remaining too high is what prevents the recovery from taking place. So it’s very important, we think, that as an administration that we . .that we do some responsible surgery, if you will, on these deficits”.

I guess having knowledge of economics wasn't a prerequisite for being appointed Treasury Secretary in 1985, at least not in the Reagan White House. I think its' safe to say the world o' crap we're in right now didn't necessarily start on January 2001.

But memories tend to be selective and short.

That's why we're here.

From Paul Hinrichs at The Aristocrats:

Hey! - Let's all stick corncobs up our butts and march around the White House, stiff-legged, butt stuck way up in the air, white as can be, with signs that say "9/13 - yo' mama!" and "Where is Reagan's Death Certificate?" We'll call ourselves the "cornholers" and we're gonna take back America from the Russians who crossed the Bering Straits while Palin was out signing books.

Open thread below... And happy birthday to our Video Cafe maven, Heather!

Some Guy's Blog: Happy Thanksgiving!

James Fallows has been posting on how our myopic media manufactured a failure out of Obama's China trip

Angry Bear: Another Reagan myth bubbling back to the surface

cab drollery: They Knew

The Sardonic Sideshow: Has the American Dream drifted north?

onegoodmove: The Right Side of History (h/t reader Geoff)

The Washington Monthly: Reagan, Bush fail GOP's new 'Purity Test'

Taylor Marsh: Howard Dean: Dems will "rue the day they didn't go to budget reconciliation to pass this bill."

Amped Status: The Critical Unraveling of U.S. Society

BAGnewsNotes: War grief in all its faces

They gave us a republic..: Nightowl Newswrap

HOLY CRAP: 'Rogue' Christianity...Prayer...The Scripture game...Bible slavery quiz...Pedophile cult attacks U.S Representative...Christianist Manifesto... Brimstone in the Religion section...Sabbath or else...Believers...He touched me...Demon obsession...Kirk Cameron Action Kit...Chuck Colson talks turkey...Vatican clerics claim monopoly on fairy tales...Muslim clerics claim monopoly on doomsday predictions...

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(Dr. Walter Heller - tried to save Reagan from himself - didn't work)

With word about the latest recession being "over", I was reminded about the last time we had a deep recession in the 1980s and how we all became familiar with the phrases "Reaganomics", Supply-Side and Voodoo-Economics.

Back in the 80s there was 10% unemployment (on paper) and it felt like it lasted forever. Former Kennedy and Johnson Economic adviser Dr. Walter Heller had a few observations to make when he was interviewed on Face The Nation in 1982.

Dr. Walter Heller: “Had the Carter program, and unfortunately it was rather forgettable, but had the Carter program been enacted, we would be in much better shape today. People seem to forget that Carter, in October of the last year of his presidency proposed a tax program that made just excellent sense. It was much smaller than the President’s program, and it concentrated more of its tax cuts, and this is what people forget, on the supply side, so to speak, on true stimulus of government investment. Instead of having enormous deficits that scare the public and Wall Street, we would have had much more moderate deficits, we’d be much better off today.”

Perhaps hindsight is 20/20 but it's interesting to speculate what might have happened had the Carter program been enacted.

But no, The Great Communicator had a better idea . . or so he said.

For the low, low price of $12.99, you can own a high quality 4X6 lustre print of Peggy Noonan, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, James Baker, and Henry Kissinger snubbing John McCain at the Reagan Foundation Dinner held at the US Capitol Building.

It's brought to you by Washington Life Magazine, which has it categorized on its "blog" under, and I am not making this up, "Pol-lywood Events."

Some days, satire just fails me.

Open Thread below....

The Political Carnival: Tea partiers turn on GOP leadership


Brilliant at Breakfast: So presumably you can have blood pressure of 110/70 and low cholesterol, but if your BMI is over 25, you too, can be denied health insurance


AverageBro: Obama navel-gazing reaches another low


Submitted to a Candid World: Why did Arafat receive a Nobel Prize, and not Reagan?


pandagon: The point, you have missed it


Compare and Contrast.  Who's the Five Star?

Our Future: The mugging of the common good

Dusty Rice: Wingers have trouble counting

Connecting.the.Dots: Uncovering the race card

Mike Whitney: The real lesson of Lehman's fall

Amygdala: Reagan was a Leninist

Opinions You Should Have: Kanye West interrupts delicate Senate Finance Committee negotiations, scuttles health care bill

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Lis Wiehl tries to explain the Commerce Clause to O'Reilly on The Factor last night because the new talking point of the health care insurance companies...Republicans...FOX News...BillO the teabagger is just that, but he can't handle the truth, dammit. Bill, it's not lawyers that are the problem just because Wiehl interpreted it the way you hate.

It's this idiot op ed by two people that worked for Bush and Reagan that are saying individual mandates are unconstitutional and causing the real "nuts" to go off the deep end. And you can be sure that the rest of the right wing loons will be jumping aboard the crazy train with him.

Wiehl: Article one in the Constitution says the Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. That is anything that goes from one state to another.

O'Reilly: So what?

Wiehl: Health care itself may be local, your doctor may be in your state but medical supplies come to you the medical equipment, all of the things...

O'Reilly: Why can they make you buy anything?

Wiehl: Because they can regulate interstate commerce. Those things go through interstate, they can force you to...

O'Reilly: OK, I want the audience to know that this is total BS. This is why people hate lawyers, this is nuts. {} The government is saying you have to buy health insurance. You have to do it. I'm saying that's unconstitutional. The federal government doesn't have the power to force an American to buy anything.

The Supreme Court over the years has used this Clause on many, many rulings. We had to buy George W Bush, Bill. Oh, you liked him---never mind. That was a different clause.

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The fear just doesn't stop, and it didn't stop in 1961. Before he was governor, Ronald Reagan was busy stirring up fears of Socialized Medicine, terrifying people into believing any sort of Public Health Care was a direct product of communism and government meddling.

And so, when the Medicare debate began during its first incarnation in 1961 (the bill was defeated owing to just these scare tactics and the influence of the Dixiecrats - the precursor to our Blue Dogs), people like Ronald Reagan flocked to the cause of the Insurance lobby, big Pharma and the AMA with the sole intent of scaring the living crap out of every human being within the United States.

And so the fear in 1961, as now is a misguided attempt at keeping the status quo pure by stamping out any thought an alternative may exist.

Ain't it all grand?

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John Fund at Americans for Prosperity's Right Online Conference cites Nate Silver's predictions for 2010, and the possibility of the Democrats losing 20-50 seats in the House. Nate talked about this with Ron Reagan Jr. on his radio show the other day and wrote about it at his blog Likely Voters and Unlikely Scenarios where he qualifies his predictions with this:

Is it possible that the electorate which is voting in November 2010 will be so down on the Democrats that they trust Republicans more on issues like these? Sure, it is possible -- if the enthusiasm gap is wide enough, if Obama's approval is low enough, if the health care debate has been bungled enough, and if the economy is still hemorrhaging jobs. But I'd consider it something of a worst-case scenario. That's probably the best way to regard these Rasmussen polls for the time being.

So maybe not quite as doom and gloom as Fund is making it out to be. As for the rest of his nonsense, well that's another matter. Fund goes on to claim that the Democrats' problem is they don't know how to govern as moderates. Heh. That's rich. Yeah, here we are again as Fund says, but not because the Democrats are governing from the left, but because they're governing as triangulating corporate "centrists".

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(William F. Buckley - so excited over the thought of a Reagan White House he called him "Mister President" a year before the election)

Early on in his campaign, then-candidate Reagan made an appearance on the Firing Line program, hosted by William F.Buckley on January 27, 1980. So taken back by the thought of a Reagan White House, Buckley kept referring to Reagan as "Mister President", asking questions that almost seemed like a coaching session for what would be the grueling campaign for an election that would take place some eleven months later.

Buckley fawned reverential, asking the most maleable of soft-ball questions, as if he didn't want to know if there were any chinks in the Reagan armor, didn't want the audience to feel there was any other candidate even worth mentioning - acting as though the Carter Presidency was already over - it was merely a waiting game until inauguration.

During the one hour session, Reagan gets into domestic policy with a couple of samples:

Reagan on Domestic Energy: “ Vast areas, known to contain minerals and possibly such sources as oil and natural gas are rapidly being taken over by the Federal government. They’re formerly federal lands but they’re now being withdrawn from any multiple use, and restricted to . . .as wilderness areas where the only people that can possibly use those public lands is that small segment of the public who maybe has the energy and the time to go backpacking and hike up to a hill and say ‘isn’t that beautiful’ but none of the rest of us will ever get to see it because they won’t allow you to put a road in.”

Reagan on Education: “I would like to dissolve the 10 billion dollar National Department of Education created by President Carter, and turn schools back to the local school districts, where we built the greatest public school system the world has ever seen. I think I could make a case in the decline of public education when federal aid became federal interference.”

He also makes no bones about his eagerness to do away with regulations citing, among others, the EPA as an evil agency, bent on destroying free enterprise.

All in all, it's a fascinating glimpse into the Candidate Reagan, with a certain amount of goodnatured bumbling tossed in for good measure.

And Buckley loved every syllable of it.

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(Edwin Wilson - one of the CIA's Greatest Hits)

As I was digging through the archives in search of more Reagan Years material, I ran across this rather interesting tidbit via ABC World News Tonight from August 28. 1981. I forgot completely about it, and it seems so did everyone else.

The story goes, Edwin Wilson was a CIA operative working in Libya and, according to various sources, was training Libyans (or anyone with a checkbook) to carry out various assassinations and plots . . everything the CIA swears up and down they don't do. There were allegations of former Green Berets enlisted to train terrorists - or as Wilson says in his interview: "to train people in compass reading and low-level field operations".

Sounds a little like he was training troops of Boyscouts, but in 1981 people paid scant attention and the story blew over rather quickly. Wilson was convicted of transporting explosives to the Libyans and sentenced to 27 years in prison. It's just interesting that a similar story came to light in the later 80's, only that time it was called the Iran-Contra affair.

Oh, those crooked webs . . . .

Via Media Matters, more proof that professional windbag Rush Limbaugh has run out of anything that might even charitably be considered as a legitimate thought. Only the truly brain-dead among his fans will swallow the latest uttering:

While fans the world over mourn the passing of the King of Pop, the King of Talk, Rush Limbaugh, put the death of Michael Jackson this way: He "flourished under Reagan," "languished under Clinton/Bush, and died under Obama." Over on MSNBC, both David Shuster and Chuck Todd poked Limbaugh for his unsavory take on the tragedy, with Todd quipping, "It's always Reagan, right?"

Meanwhile, El Rushbo's pals over at Fox News knew exactly how to interpret the wall-to-wall coverage of Jackson's death. An actual Fox News chyron alleged a "cover-up" because the media were devoting more coverage to Jackson than cap-and-trade legislation. Lord, the fun one could have using this very rationale to pick apart the stories Fox chooses to cover. I guess when you're a hammer, everything is a ... wild conspiracy designed to frighten your audience and fan the flames of their paranoia.

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There is an old saying that it is better to stay silent and thought the fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. I suspect that there are many on TV who would be wise to take that advice.

Take for example, Meghan McCain. I actually kind of like her, because she's shown a rare independence, refusing to simply spew the same talking points of other Republicans and some sass when dealing with the hackiest of the right wing hacks who take cheap pot shots at her. But there's no doubt that she is very young and perhaps needs a little more historical perspective before opining on national television.

It all got started during a discussion of George Bush, who McCain acknowledged was a less than perfect president. But McCain also pointed a finger at the Obama administration in Bush's defense, saying she felt that the Obama administration "has to stop completely blaming everything on its predecessor." When Maher asked McCain if she really thought this is what Obama is doing, McCain said "I do to a degree." A clearly annoyed Begala immediately shook his head and said "not to enough of a degree, I'm sorry not nearly enough." He then began to explain how President Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter for years, to which McCain responded blithely "you know I wasn't born yet so I wouldn't know." Going in for the kill, Begala fired back "I wasn't born during the French Revolution but I know about it."

McCain then reverts to the tried and true Republican tactic of playing the victim:

You clearly know everything and I'm just the blond sitting here.

Meghan, Meghan, Meghan...you can stand up to Laura Ingraham and yet you just wilt in front of Paul Begala and play victim? Is it having facts and an actual historical perspective instead of just making crap up to play to the lowest common denominator that intimidates you?