Real Genius

If these geniuses in the GOP end up winning this fight on health care, we should all give up. Because look at the intellectual rigor they bring to the debate.

Michael Steele:

CNN: What type of health insurance do you have? Do you get that through the RNC?

STEELE: Yup, through my employer.

CNN: What company is it?

STEELE: Uhh. BlueCross BlueShield, I believe. Or maybe not.

Elsewhere today, Steele names four policies that would reduce health care costs, former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough calls him out for being full of crap, and Steele treats him like his dad telling him he can't borrow the car.



"Spare me." Hilarious.

Elsewhere, Jim DeMint thinks he came up with a cunning plan by deliberately stating Republican strategy to use the lives of the uninsured as a proxy to "beat" Obama.



These guys make me pine for Ronald Reagan. He was wrong, but at least he had an original point (at the time) and could speak in complete sentences (again, at the time).

Seriously, if we don't end up running circles around these guys, we're really sunk.

"Is There Anything Wrong With Saying Yes?"

New York Times reporters had a conversation with Barack Obama on his plane, where they actually asked him if he were a socialist. Obama answered no, explained the thought process behind his budget, and later, after pondering it, actually called the reporters back and said, "It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question."

As a statement of empirical reality, this is true. As Daniel Gross pretty expertly explained, the Bush tax cuts that Obama is allowing to expire would result in about 3-4 percentage-point increases in the two top marginal tax rates, which is about $4 a day for someone making $300,000 a year. And despite the media insanity around the issue, the other 98% that doesn't make over $250,000 would see a tax cut, making it hard to understand how you can call this an overall increase. People in that top 2% can whine about how they are being persecuted for their genius and talk about going Galt all they want - and I hope they do instead of just talking about it, we need elites that don't have a track record of breaking the global economy - but the kind of "burden" placed on the wealthy, who have it better in America than any other country on Earth, isn't even the burden their patron saint placed upon them in the 1980s, which they also whined about incessantly.

According to a recent Treasury Department study, Ronald Reagan proposed the largest peacetime tax increase in American history as part of a budget deal to get the federal deficit under control. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982 was signed into law on Sept. 3, and most of its provisions took effect on Jan. 1, 1983.

During debate on TEFRA, many conservatives predicted economic disaster. They argued that raising taxes in the midst of a severe recession was exactly the wrong thing to do. "Every school child knows you don't raise taxes in a recession unless you want to make it worse," The Wall Street Journal's editorial page warned. Said Rep. Newt Gingrich, "I think it will make the economy sicker." The Chamber of Commerce of the U.S. said it had "no doubt that it will curb the economic recovery everyone wants."

Looking at the data, however, it is very hard to see any evidence that TEFRA had a negative effect on growth. Indeed, one could easily make a case that its enactment stimulated growth. As one can see, the economy's growth rates after TEFRA took effect were among the fastest in history.

I know that Paul Volcker's monetary policy at the Fed, a luxury we pretty much don't have right now, had a lot more to do with this, but the point is that the same defenders of the rich and powerful made the same statements about taxes then that they are making now.

But beyond the debates over opinions which are obviously ridiculous, there's a larger point that was touched upon in the follow-up question about socialism by the Times.

Q. Is there anything wrong with saying yes?

Only in a country where the balance of acceptable discourse has been so tainted and distorted that reasonable social democratic policies are completely forbidden from the conversation. And so you have Obama's advisers running to David Brooks to prove that they aren't crazy socialist radicals, but pragmatists. Which makes a certain political sense, but isn't actually true. In fact, the debate over the stimulus package was quite instructive in this regard. Obama released an initial bill that was too small for the task, perhaps assuming that the package would get bigger, as most spending bills do, as it made its way through Congress. Therefore they would not be saddled with the impression that they were expanding government as much as Congressional Democrats would. That's not what happened, and as a result, the stimulus is looking too small for the task.

Analysts increasingly view the administration's actions so far as insufficient given the scope of the problem. The stimulus package was designed to "save or create" 3.5 million jobs, according to the administration. But the nation has already lost 4.4 million jobs since the start of the recession. Many banks and other financial institutions, whose health is critical to the economy, are teetering, and the Treasury Department has yet to finalize the details of its plans to remove from their balance sheets the toxic assets dragging them down.

"It's premature to say we need another stimulus, but the economy is performing much worse than when [the law] was signed, and the odds are increasing that we'll need a bigger policy response," said Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com, who has advised Democratic lawmakers. "What we've learned is policy has been a step behind this whole downturn. It's important to get a step ahead."

It was well-known among economists that the size of the stimulus may have been too small, but that perspective was kept off the news. It was surely known to the Administration, however, which preferred a more cautious route.

The subsequent release of the budget, along with moving forward on long-sought initiatives on health care and energy, does seem bolder, and there are signs that Obama is learning from what may have been an initial negotiating mistake. But even this
"boldness" is being carried out along narrow technocratic liberal lines that becomes very clear from a look at the past:

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...

Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power? [...]

All right, then, forget FDR. He was a socialist, anyway. Let Dwight Eisenhower serve as a model for the Obama administration. President Eisenhower authorized the biggest infrastructure program in American history, when he signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The interstate highway act created an elaborate system of private tax incentives and public-private partnerships (PPPs) to encourage private corporations to build national highways. To begin with, all U.S. highways were leased to domestic and foreign corporations for a period of decades. Second, all U.S. highways were set up with toll booths, so that American drivers would be forced to repay the corporate owners of the national highways every few dozen miles. Finally, a system of high-speed lanes with higher tolls was created, so that the rich could whiz down the road while middle-class and poor Americans were stuck in traffic jams ...

All right, what now, wise guy? So that's wrong, too? Eisenhower's national highway system wasn't based on tolls, leases to foreign companies, income-based pricing, and tax credits for private corporations? It used gasoline taxes to fund free public highways?

Free highways without toll booths, owned by the public, paid for out of taxes? My God. So the John Birch Society was right after all. Dwight Eisenhower was as much of a socialist as Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

The point here is that conservatives have so demonized the concept of the public commons, particularly inside the Beltway, that what is now considered a bold and socialistic policy shift - raising the top marginal tax rates 3-4%, investing in infrastructure with a mix of public and private money, using an individual mandate to keep insurance companies in the health care game, cap and trade - is actually a pre-compromised, market-friendly, neoliberal jumble that fits squarely in the center of the ideological divide. And this is essentially why the Army of Galts screams about socialism, to force the debate further to the right from the center where it is now situated.

I'm not totally blaming Obama for this. As a pragmatist, he is more interested in what is politically possible, and 50 years of conservative demonization has battered the ability to make anything that's not "market-friendly." In addition, members of his own party are even more cautious than he is and thus even more unwilling to do anything truly paradigm-shifting. But we have to understand the historical reality.

But a lot has changed since Wall Street imploded last fall. The great investment banks are gone, the U.S. has nationalized much of the financial system, and appears to be on the way to effectively nationalizing the automobile and housing sectors as well. In this environment, we need to consider some heresies, like the idea that the best way to provide a public good is not necessarily to pour subsidies on middlemen, and then bail them out with more subsidies when they fail at their public function.

The fundamental barrier today is the way that the issues are framed, by Democrats and Republicans alike. Thus the problem is defined not as making credit available for individuals and businesses, but as saving the banks and the shadow banking system. The goal is not to provide healthcare to all citizens, but to enable all citizens to purchase private health insurance. The objective is not to ensure universal access to higher education; it is to insure universal access to colleges and universities. In these and other cases, the means is confused with the end. The ultimate goal -- providing credit, healthcare or education -- is identified with the interests of non-governmental for-profit or nonprofit providers of that service. If these private institutions fail to provide the public service in a low-cost, effective and equitable way, then they must be subsidized even more. The idea of achieving the same public goals through simpler, more direct and efficient means that would cut out the middleman appears to be heresy to the Obama administration.

By the way, this is a centrist, Michael Lind, writing this. But one who is mindful of the past.

I grow fairly tired of the defense that "the President isn't a socialist; he isn't even doing anything that radical" used as a defense, when we're in a position with unemployment and the overall economic meltdown where we actually, um, NEED something radical done. And I think the country is prepared for that more than Beltway insiders think. So while I agree with the empirical assessment that Obama's positions are squarely in the center, and that the cult of Galtism is absurd, I don't believe that Obama's team is made up of pragmatists. Because pragmatists would look at reality and do exactly what's necessary, regardless of ideological concerns.

Reagan-esque

I'm sure that, when Israel stops their assault on Gaza with a unilateral cease-fire just days before Barack Obama takes office, commentators on the right will give him all kinds of credit for his presence being able to stop the war, the way they gave Reagan credit for ending the hostage situation in Iran just by his mere accession to the office. The missing link in that parallel, of course, is that Reagan's people negotiated a side deal during October to get the Iranians not to release the hostages and help Carter. But surely, they'll have the intellectual honesty to attribute the same thing to Obama that they did to Reagan.

Surely.

Pop Quiz Time

So Mitt Romney, who was embarrassed in California, a beaten third all over the Southwest and really only strong in states he had a house in, has decided to spend Tagg's future kids' college funds and stay in a futile quest for the GOP nomination. And the bureau chief at Pravda Online Hugh Hewitt decided to make an analogy to commemorate this bold (some would say ignorant) decision. Now what public figure from the recent past do you suppose Hewitt would use in said analogy to describe Romney's choice?

I'll give you ten seconds. Hum the "Match Game PM" theme to keep time.

....

Give up?

Like Reagan In '76, Romney Is Staying In

Congratulations! Hugh Hewitt, you're the proud recipient of the Reagan Library's "One Billion References to Reagan" Award! We'll fly you and a guest first-class from Reagan National Airport to Simi Valley for a tour of the Reagan Library! That's right, you'll drive down the Ronald Reagan Freeway and onto Ronald Reagan Drive, where you'll take in the Reagan Oval Office, the Reagan legacy, and the Reagan Reagan, a special of this prize package!! And we'll give you a stack of Reagan dimes and a DVD copy of the CBS miniseries "The Reagans" for you to burn!! Reagan Reagan Reagan 9/11 Reagan!!!

Sheesh, if they could re-animate St. Ronnie's corpse... he'd do better than Mitt Romney. And actually that'd make at least 3 corpses running on the GOP side this year.

Help From His Special Friend

It is completely bizarre that Mitt Romney got help from Tim Russert at last night's debate, with Russert whispering what Ronald Reagan did as part of a Social Security restructuring in 1982 ("he raised taxes"):



Does Russert give Democrats a break on his tough questions? Does he give little hints to them?

What an embarrassment.

UPDATE: I guess there is no unanimity that this was Russert doing the whispering. IMO, it happened way too fast for it to be anybody else, and to me it sounds like Russert.

John Edwards Rocks Downtown LA

(more pics, courtesy of the Edwards campaign, at this photo set.)



John Edwards has generated a bit of notoriety today for smacking down Barack Obama's suggestion that Ronald Reagan can be credibly seen as a model of change.

“I would never use Ronald Reagan as an example of change...

"He was openly -- openly -- intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country. He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment...

"I can promise you this: This president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."

Edwards didn't mention any of this today at a rally in downtown Los Angeles at the SEIU Local 721 headquarters, but he did have some choice words for another actor-turned-politician.

The speakers prior to Edwards included members of the Los Angeles City Council, Herb Wesson and Richard Alarcon (Janice Hahn was also in attendance). All of them made a straight electability argument for Edwards' candidacy, which was a little jarring (especially because Edwards did not do so). Wesson even added "I don't care who's the first this or the first that, I want the best candidate to lead our country."

(Wesson also asked "When was the last time California mattered in the Presidential primary, and I yelled "1968 and 1972," but I don't think he heard me. Incidentally, given that three of the intervening races between now and then weren't competitive, that was only 5 primaries ago.)

Edwards, however, stuck to the facts, and his powerful argument for why he should be President. He offered the same policy shifts on Iraq (all combat troops out in 12 months), health care (universal coverage mandated for every American, mental health, preventive and long-term care included), global warming (80% reductions in emissions by 2050, no new nuclear or coal-fired power plants), defending the Constitution (ending Guantanamo, torture, rendition, and illegal spying), poverty (expanded social aid and an increase of the minimum wage to $9.50 indexed to inflation), and labor (fair trade and tax policy, the Employee Free Choice Act, no scab hiring, strong support for unions). But I want to cite two moments that deviated from the script.

First, Edwards has been discussing the sad case of Nataline Sarkysian, the 17 year-old from Glendale who was denied a liver transplant by her health insurer CIGNA, and died shortly after the company reversed the decision. This time, Sarkysian's parents were on stage with Sen. Edwards, and when he related that tragic story, I couldn't help but watch Nataline's mother choke up. It was affecting, it hit you right in the gut. And when Edwards said, in respect to the health insurers, "Are you telling me we should sit down at the table with these people? Never! I don't want to be their President," it was undeniably moving.

Second, Sen. Edwards obviously did his homework before the rally. He brought up the California budget crisis, and the austere across-the-board cuts proposed by Gov. Schwarzenegger. It's fair to say that he wasn't a fan. Here's his comments (a paraphrase):

I spent a day earlier this year with an SEIU health care worker... the people she cares for need her. The last thing this or any state needs are cuts to that kind of health care. The last thing you need are cuts to K-12 education. Does anybody believe that we are spending too much on K-12 education in this country?

It's fantastic to have Edwards still in the race. He's obviously an underdog at this point, and he willingly acknowledged that, saying that he's going up against "two hundred-million-dollar candidates." The compression of the primary calendar will make it very difficult for him to get his message out to the February 5 states. Yet he said to the assembled crowd of several hundred that "you have the ability to send a message and build a grassroots movement, a wave across this state and across this country." There's no question that Edwards has driven the policy agenda throughout this race, and his bold strain of populism and unabashed liberalism is sorely needed in Washington. However, sadly, even some of his most ardent supporters were making the case for Edwards to stay in the race to horde delegates and extract something from the eventual winner, rather than a case for him winning.

UPDATE: A neat postscript: Cate Edwards, the Senator's daughter, was on hand, and after the speech she was chatting with Mimi Kennedy of PDA, our local election reform activist here in LA. Minutes later, I saw Cate with something written on her bag: "Bradblog.com". Progress is slow, but it's happening.

Shorter Paul Krugman

David Brooks can't handle the truth.

(a little backstory. Ronald Reagan may or may not have been a racist, but he openly appealed to racists to win the Presidency. David Brooks is shocked that St. Reagan would be "slandered" by such a characterization. Paul Krugman spends 800 words calling him a fool.)

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility.

Read the whole thing. In the faded mists of history, Republicans wouldn't dare see their hero Ronnie as anything but a kindly saint. They're wrong.

QOTD

From Political Wire:

"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

Ronald Reagan from his diaries, May 1986.

Brilliant on so many levels. Who knows, one different move by Reagan and Bush could have been the guy calling us "blogofascists."

UPDATE: This is not true. It was a joke written by Michael Kinsley in a recent New Republic article. Damn you Taegan Goddard!

Relying On Ignorance

Another example of Republicans relying on the weeklong attention span of the American electorate can be seen in this chart by McClatchy:



Far from being "the way the Senate does business," filibusters of this amount are COMPLETELY WITHOUT PRECEDENT in the last 45 years. Yet the press continues to report this as "The Congress just can't get anything done," without the historic context, and people get perturbed that those politicians in Washington can't get anything done, and so they hate the whole lot of them. This is a deliberate tactic from Republicans because they know it's their only way out of their political hole in 2008. Frank Luntz (via Digby) lays it out (I always like when a GOP operative asks the question "Can the GOP bounce back?" as if he has no vested interest in the outcome):

Still, a Republican victory is not impossible. Not yet. One promising indicator is the fact that Congress is at its lowest approval point in a generation - even lower than in 1994, when Republicans seized the majority in the House after 40 years of Democratic control.

The Democrats blew into Washington in 2006 as a breath of fresh air in response to Republican scandal, Republican budget mismanagement and a Republican war. But in recent weeks, that freshness has turned stale. Despite majorities in both houses, Congress is seen as having failed to set tough ethics standards, failed to stop wasteful spending and failed to fix illegal immigration.

And those failures offer a glimmer of hope for the GOP.

Anger and frustration toward politicians is even greater than it was in 1992, when Ross Perot won nearly 20 percent of the popular vote as a third-party candidate. Americans are fed up with Washington, with the noise and static, with the lack of common sense and with nothing ever getting done. If a Republican candidate empathizes with and embraces the fed-up nation, that's step one.

How much you wanna bet that Luntz came up with this idea to filibuster absolutely everything and obstruct the Congress from doing the nation's business?

You can see this in California too. Republicans in the State Senate is obstructing the passage of the budget, which isn't great but has been agreed to by all other parties. State Senate Republicans claim to have objections to the budget but REFUSE to spell them out. They have no interest in writing a responsible budget plan. They simply want to make government look bad because they think that bodes well for them.

You have the monster Reagan created when he called government the problem rather than the solution; a political party so wedded to their ideology that they would rather shut down the government than allow the other side a "victory," victory being broadly defined as the passage of any legislation affecting the lives of any citizens. This is the ultimate bad actor tunneling its way into the corridors of power. They worship power but detest the business that goes along with it; so they explain to their constituents that he who governs least governs best, and as if to prove it they try really hard not to govern at all, and damn the consequences.

Democrats highlighted this last week with the all-night Iraq debate. They need to keep going. This Custer's Last Stand by filibustering every piece of legislation needs to be exposed for what it is, a cheap political ploy. The Republicans ought to remember that Custer lost his battle.

Reagan/Ford = Bush/Cheney

Bart Gellman, writer of the WaPo series on Fourthbranch, gave another little nugget today on Hardball, suggesting that the Bush-Cheney deal for the Vice Presidency in 2000 was very similar to the near-deal between Reagan and Gerald Ford to operate what amounted to a "co-presidency" in 1980. In fact, Cheney, Ford's former chief of staff, was apparently very involved in those discussions. Ultimately, the Ford camp overreached and asked for too much and the Reagan camp wouldn't give enough and it all fell apart. But clearly that wasn't the case with Cheney.

People do forget that Cheney was seen as a good choice for the VP slot in terms of his experience and credentials, and that Bush needed him to a certain extent to burnish his national security bona fides. I recall many people, after the 2000 VP debate, saying that they were upset that those two weren't running for President (try thinking about who those two candidates were without punching yourself repeatedly in the throat). Sadly, I think we're learning that one of them was.

Bush apparently promised Fourthbranch something pretty big, and he has used that power to work within the cracks of the Constitution and subvert it. So I don't know if it's blackmail, but it's certainly about a man who knows how to play Bush like a Stradavarius. He knows the guy's weaknesses and how to push his buttons. I think it's more like body snatching, really. Fourthbranch has colonized an unused part of George's brain. In other words, George's brain.

UPDATE: Gellman confirms this in print in a sidebar to today's installment:

Pollsters spoke of a "dream ticket" after Ronald Reagan won the 1980 Republican nomination and talk turned to Ford as his No. 2. Aides to both men tried to negotiate arrangements that might lure a former commander in chief into a secondary position.

Contemporary accounts said Ford was represented by former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger and others. But at a 2000 conference of former White House chiefs of staff, Cheney disclosed that he had been deeply involved. He recalled an intense debate about how to shape expanded lines of authority in a job often ridiculed as largely ceremonial.

Ford "made a number of requests in terms of his influence over the budget, personnel, foreign policy, et cetera," Cheney said. "I can remember sitting in a session with Bill Casey, who later became CIA director. Bill had a list of items that in fact the Reagan people were prepared to discuss. They went a long way toward trying to accommodate President Ford."

Tempted, but wary of splintering presidential authority, Ford finally withdrew his name. Quayle, looking back on it, said Cheney appears to have accepted much the same deal.

19:1

Obviously, the Republican candidates want no part of the Bush lagacy, and if a bunch of Democrats were running for President after one of their own was at 30% in the polls for close to a year, you'd see the same thing. But the fact that they have to go back 20-plus years to find a conservative figure that they respect, that they can trot out to the nation without everybody laughing in their face... that's just sad.

I was in elementary school when Reagan took office. There's an entire generation eligible to vote that doesn't remember him at all (considering what really happened in that era, and how cruel and vicious Reagan was to the poor, maybe that's a good thing for his legacy). I don't think wrapping Reagan in some hazy gauze and thinking that will appeal to voters in 2008 is really going to work. Neither will saying you don't believe in evolution (which is like saying you don't believe in gravity), but there you are.

UPDATE: Yes, that bit where Giuliani claimed Reagan got the hostages back from Iran because he "stared them down" is patently absurd. First of all, he negotiated arms deals with the Iranians later in his term; second of all, Reagan allowed Iraq to use chemical weapons on his own people, and he sent Donald Rumsfeld to tell Saddam Hussein it'd be OK; and third, he had back-channel talks with Tehran while he was running for President to ensure that the hostages wouldn't be released until his inauguration. It's a total fabrication that the Ayatollah released the hostages because he was scared by the manly steely glare of St. Ronnie.

Watch What You Eat

When I finally had to buy my dog her food last week, for the first time since the pet food contamination scandal, I actually had to worry about it. And apparently, I need to worry about my own intake as well. The whole thing is due to spiking food with melamine to make it look like it has more protein and more nutritional value than it actually has. And this has been well-known for some time by the FDA. I haven't written about it, but Goldy has:

Months after dogs and cats started dropping dead of renal failure from melamine-tainted pet food, American consumers are beginning to learn how long and how wide this contaminant has also poisoned the human food supply. Last week, as California officials revealed that at least 45 people are known to have eaten tainted pork, the USDA announced that it would pay farmers millions of dollars to destroy and dispose of thousands of hogs fed “salvaged” pet food.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Through the salvaging practice, melamine-tainted pet food has likely contaminated America’s livestock for as long as it has been killing and sickening America’s pets — as far back as August of 2006, or even earlier. And while it may seem alarmist to suggest without absolute proof that Americans have been eating melamine-tainted pork, chicken and farm-raised fish for the better part of a year, the FDA and USDA seem to be preparing to brace Americans for the worst. In an unusual, Saturday afternoon joint press release, the regulators tasked with protecting the safety of our nation’s food supply go to convoluted lengths to reassure the public that eating melamine-tainted pork is perfectly safe.

We don't have a federal food inspection system in this country anymore. We have a federal cover-up of problems with food inspection system. Rick Perlstein calls them E.Coli conservatives. The systematic de-fanging of our regulatory agencies is a legacy of Reagan-Bush conservative rule.