Ronald Reagan

There’s been plenty of mockery of the three actual or potential Republican presidential candidates who named Ronald Reagan as the greatest living president, but New York magazine's Chait feels their pain, sort of. Chait observed in a Wednesday post that GOPers are in a bind when choosing the best living POTUS given that 1) for obvious reasons, they wouldn’t pick Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton; 2)…

Appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO show Friday night, actor/comedian Billy Crystal delighted in recounting a phone call he supposedly received from the late Robin Williams on the day of Ronald Reagan’s funeral in 2004. Crystal, now a star of FX’s The Comedians, impersonated Williams impersonating Reagan calling from Heaven and wondering why it was so hot.

A great third season ending Wednesday night on FX’s The Americans, as the episode juxtaposed then-President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech with two undercover KGB agents in the U.S. distraught by the charge as their frantic teenage daughter, who just recently learned their true identity, gets on the phone to tell her pastor that her parents are Russians. Plus, a cameo of the voice of Chris…

Today's Census Bureau report on durable goods orders was like a poorly made cake with delicious frosting: tasty at first, but awful when fully experienced. The frosting in today's report was that overall orders increased in March by a seasonally adjusted 4.0 percent. The trouble is that an important, widely recognized element of that report — what the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger vaguely…

Rush Limbaugh, as is frequently the case, was right. The other day, after a media kerfuffle surrounding Senator Rand Paul’s announcement and a rash of stories about the Senator’s televised go-rounds with NBC’s Today host Savannah Guthrie and an earlier one with CNBC’s Kelly Evans, Rush pointed out the obvious. Guthrie treated Paul as an oddball, practically an alien.

A favorite historical claim of Ronald Reagan-bashers is that he showed signs of senility in office. The New York Times is still fiddling around on this with the latest “scientific” proof in a March 30 article headlined “Parsing Ronald Reagan’s Words for Early Signs of Alzheimer’s.” The author, Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, was a Times medical correspondent for 40 years. Craig Shirley, a longtime…

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait claims that for today’s GOP, “everything Reagan thought or did was presumptively correct, even the things that contradict the other things he did.” Specifically, “the Reagan cult is largely (though not entirely) a propaganda vehicle for the anti-tax movement,” even though “in reality, Reagan veered wildly out of step with anti-tax orthodoxy.” The Washington…

On Sunday, ABC’s This Week discussed the political fallout from the annual CPAC conference and the entire panel, excluding conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, deemed the conservative gathering politically dangerous for any potential Republican presidential candidate. ABC’s Matthew Dowd claimed that CPAC was so far to the right “[w]hat would happen if Ronald Reagan, with that record…

Well before Obama moved into the White House, he believed his presidency would have “the potential for shifting the national paradigm” to the left as Reagan’s moved it to the right, and Brian Beutler contends that such a shift still could happen if “the economy’s rapid growth in recent quarters” continues.

From a shining city on a hill and Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, to terrible deeds in the name of Christ and terrorists' legitimate grievances. The chasm between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama when it comes to their views of America and the world could hardly be wider. But on today's Up With Steve Kornacki, when the host asked the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart whether President Obama…

Yesterday, in a column at his organization's web site, the head of the nation's leading polling organization called the government's official unemployment rate, currently at 5.6 percent, a "big lie." Rest assured that if Gallup Inc. Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton had written this column during a Republican or conservative administration, his words would have been picked up by the Associated Press…

The Americans returns tonight with its third season debut at 10 PM EST/PST. While the FX series humanizes undercover KGB operatives working in the U.S., the show illustrates the ruthlessness of Soviet communism and how the American Left in the 1980s advanced Soviet interests. (Four videos below)

Elias Isquith contends that “after eight years of George W. Bush,” America “was in such rotten shape that Obama had little time to do more than stave off the next crisis,” but that by this past Tuesday night, favorable economic developments gave Obama “an opportunity to boast of changing the ‘trajectory’ of the country like few presidents before him and none since Ronald Reagan.”

Without laughing, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday’s World News Tonight advanced the White House hope that Barack Obama will be seen as Ronald Reagan was in 1987, as a President who rescued the economy and was rewarded by voters.