The Post Turtle An old Texas Rancher got his hand caught in a gate while working his cattle. He wrapped the hand in a bandana and drove his pickup to the doctor. While stitching him up, the doctor asked what he thought about Barack Obama. The old rancher said, "Well, ya know, Obama is a Post Turtle." âWhatâs a Post Turtle?â asked the doctor. The old man drawled, "Well, sometimes when you're driving down a country road, you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top. That's a Post Turtle." He looked up and saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued: "You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he doesnât know what to do while he's up there, and you just want to help the poor dumb thing get down."
Gee, they're not biased or anything are they? According to New York Times reporter Matt Bai, CBPP is one of three left wing think tanks funded by the Democracy Alliance. The other two are the Center for American Progress and the Economic Policy Institute. According to Bai's account, representatives of CBPP and the other two Democracy Alliance-sponsored think tanks attended the May 2006 meeting of the Democracy Alliance at the Barton Creek Resort near Austin, Texas. Their role was to "talk about the agendas they were busy crafting that would catapult Democratic politics into the economic future."[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_on_Budget_and_Policy_Priorities
Reagan did not bring the USSR down to their knees. Rather, it was the country's own economic mediocrity that did the job, over time. The wheels were in motion long before Reagan took office.
I fundamentally agree. He knew this situation, e.g., from estimating their declining crops via our spy satellites, estimating their borrowing patterns in the West, etc, and tightened the screws at the right time by expaning NATO's, and, primarily, US defense expenditures (e.g., Pershing missiles deployed in Europe, 600 vessel Navy deployed with accelerated maintenance schedules, etc) The Soviets tried to keep up and that was the straw that broke the camel's back: they defaulted on loans and lost their funding. It was such a mess that the ruling faction lost its nerve and the (already very fragile) system collapsed. As Sun Tzu so laconically said in "The Art Of War": "In action, watch the timing." Reagan's determined timing was flawless and the results truly extraordinary. Thank God for all of us, a better political era was ushered in with a lot fewer MAD overtones.