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There wasn’t much cause for excitement that cold Monday a century ago.  There was no reason to expect the boy born in a little room above a store in Tampico, Illinois would amount to much.  His was a very modest family, after all.  As the baby would recall later in life, “We didn’t live on the wrong side of the tracks, but we were close enough to hear the train whistles.”

Yet it turned out that baby was very remarkable, indeed.  His parents named him Ronald Wilson Reagan, and the long journey that started in that forgotten Illinois town eventually took him to Hollywood stardom, the California Governor’s mansion and ultimately to the White House.

February 6, 2011 is an important date for all of us.  The centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth is an opportunity to revisit his legacy and to consider its importance today.

We Granite Staters are very familiar with President Reagan.  His victory in the 1980 GOP New Hampshire presidential primary set him on the path that led to the Reagan Revolution.  For 50 years before that, many Americans were under the spell of “New Deal thinking.”  President Franklin Roosevelt’s emergency response to the Great Depression took root and became the way people viewed all problems: whenever a new one arose, a big, powerful federal government would step in and make it go away, usually by throwing huge piles of borrowed money at it and by enacting regulations that restricted individual freedom and hamstrung small businesses.  To put it bluntly, Washington grew too big for its britches, and its spending binges were sending America to the Poor House.

Then Ronald Reagan arrived on the national stage.  He confidently proclaimed “Government isn’t the solution; government is the problem.”  He proved…

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This was left as a comment on my Facebook Doodling post – it deserved to be brought to the front:

So many departments (to cut), so little time. We are living in a target rich environment, so let us set our crosshairs on DC, and fire some Federal employees. We need someone to slash and burn their way through the capital and restore self government to "We the People".

So, with all those mixed and warlike metaphors, I expect the PC police to show up at any moment – better ‘splain myself 🙂

So much of Washington is useless, bloated, expensive, and takes away large amounts of our liberty while delivering little of value.

You can tell an unreformed statist (Mr Gingrich) from the real Jeffersonian, when they talk about legislating a change in the way the Federal government mandates what the states should do, and how it will generously pay for part of what is mandated.

The real deal comes in with a list of useless departments and a real plan for turning over first their function and then their funding to the states, so that the states can choose…

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