Someone dragged Saint Ronnie from the grave and brought him back to star in this animated film clip, which is a preview of the feature-length film entitled "I Want Your Money." It's available for the low, low price of $19.95 unless you want the gift pack, which includes stickers and other assorted goodies. There are even Obama bobbleheads...for a price.

"I Want Your Money" is directed and produced by Ray Griggs, an aspiring Los Angeles-area filmmaker. To his credit, he's quite talented and creative when it comes to concept and art. Facts? Not so much, but then, facts aren't important when you're trying to make a point.

Griggs released this movie in 2010 and received some mild attention from the New York Times back then. Otherwise, it seemed to gain a following from the right wingers, but never broke into the mainstream. But never say die to a winger. Another election season, another opportunity.

The actual film features interviews with economic giants a whole bunch of Fox News contributors masquerading as economic experts.

Here's why it won't work to re-release it again. In 2010, everyone was all upset about the Affordable Care Act and stirred into a lather on the right, and the left was a little bit blasé, causing lower turnout on their side of things. But it's 2012 now, and we've gotten a close look at what the right wing means when they say they're going to "focus like a laserbeam" on the economy.

It means they're going to vote to ban abortion about 1,000 times between state and federal legislatures. It means ALEC will write their laws for them. It means that taxes will never, ever be on the table even if it means shutting the government down or defaulting on our national debt. It means a deal is never a deal, because they lie to do a deal and then try to weasel out of it later.

Other than the True Believers, no one today believes anything these yahoos say about the economy or taxes and no one really believes they have the first clue how to fix things, but what people do know is that something is seriously out of whack and Congress is too busy obsessing on birth control and abortion to actually, you know, be serious about doing something about it.

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Washington DC - I arrived at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, around 9:30 a.m. People snaked around turnstiles waiting to get their badges certifying they had paid the $195 adult entrance fee.

Upstairs, the student line was much longer. They only had to pay $35. It's important to get young blood into the Grand Old Party.

They had paid to see the stars of the conservative movement. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt, Marco Rubio, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, even Sarah Palin has come out of hibernation and is scheduled to speak on Saturday.

There was talk of an Occupy infiltration and the finely dressed attendants were on the lookout. One man, wearing a cowboy hat and wielding a digital camera approached a police officer outside, "have you seen any occupiers?" he asked. "No," the officer responded.

Around noon I was sitting in a chair near the VIP room. Rick Perry was scheduled to speak at 1:20 p.m. in the Marriott ballroom. Three tall white men wearing suits and earbuds were seated across from me. One was standing. They briefly discussed security.

"I asked him if he wanted a walkthrough... and he said, 'I'm drunk, I don't care,'" said the older looking gentleman, who had apparently talked to the person he was securing.

Another one said, "Thanks for taking one for the team Rick."

After Perry gave his speech I attempted to ask him if he preferred bourbon or scotch, but he ignored me.

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At the beginning of the day, I started off at an event called "How to raise money... the easy way" put on by the Leadership Institute, a Republican training organization.

The speaker, Joel Mowbray, told the audience of mostly young men that "You make up a lot of ground with one $10,000 donation."

He said that there's no such thing as altruism and when a big donor cuts a big check the donor is looking for access.

"Asking for money bestows a level of credibility onto the campaign," said Mowbry, "It says I believe in my campaign." He told the audience the only two things a candidate should be doing is asking for money or asking for votes. Noted.

From there, I went to the massive Marriott Ballroom, which has been adorned with giant television screens, a huge stage and thousands of chairs, all filled, for Marco Rubio's speech.

The Florida Senator took the stage to loud applause. He made a speech about American Exceptionalism, how important it is that the U.S. remains the most powerful country in the world, a point Republicans often make.

"What happens if we diminish because we can no longer be the greatest country in the world?" asked Rubio.

"The greatest thing we can do for the world is be America," said Rubio. He added that we have to be an example for other countries, "the shining city on the Hill" he said, quoting Reagan, who took the line "city on a hill" from the Bible and made it shiny.

Reagan symbolism is all over CPAC. Pictures of him hang in the main lobby, stickers of his face are handed out and many speakers tied their speeches back to him.

Male CPAC attendees almost universally wore suits and females wore dresses. There were booths for ALEC, Tea Party.net, Hot Air, the NRA, Citizens United Productions, the Washington Examiner and Newt 2012, among others. One booth was selling Santorum sweaters. Surprisingly, I didn't see any Ron Paul supporters, despite the fact that his fans rushed the event last year to give him a strong victory in the 2011 CPAC straw poll.

I saw a number of people sporting Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum stickers, but I didn't see one person outwardly supporting Mitt Romney. In fact, during one speech in the Marriott Ballroom a speaker mentioned Mitt Romney and a female in the audience yelled out, "Mexican!"

In another room, much smaller than the Marriott Ballroom, I attended a panel discussion on labor unions. At this one, four men discussed the repeal of SB5 in Ohio, Scott Walker's actions in Wisconsin and heaped praise on Chris Christie. I arrived a little late, but I caught the gist of the conversation.

"I don't think revolution is too big of a word to use to describe what Chris Christie is doing," said Kevin Mooney, a reporter for the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, 'the leading voice for free markets in Louisiana.'

F. Vincent Vernuccio, a speaker from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that after the repeal of SB5, an-anti collective bargaining bill, Ohio would have to build a Berlin-style wall to keep people in. He said they'd flock to Indiana and Wisconsin, two states that have fought unions.

He said the failure in Ohio was the messaging, "We have to get our messaging together, we have to get our funding together and we have to break up the bills."

I walked out and went up the escalator to get a late afternoon lunch. As I rode the escalator up, Hot Air was interviewing Michelle Bachmann. She was in an all white dress.

As I was leaving I caught this guy talking about the tea party:

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Credit: New York Times

In their scorched-earth effort to deliver another $700 billion tax cut windfall for the wealthy, Republicans have fittingly appropriated their favorite global warming talking point: "uncertainty." Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and John Boehner are just of the GOP leaders claiming "Congress ought to act today to stop all the tax hikes" because "it would reduce the uncertainty that's affecting employers all across our country." Of course, they are predictably silent about the 1980's, when Ronald Reagan upended the tax code four times in five years, including "the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime." And despite conservative warnings then as now about "job-killing tax hikes," American businesses responded by adding 23 million jobs after President Clinton raised upper-income tax rates in 1993.

Since the age of Reagan, the Republican electoral strategy has been "you can fool some of the people some of the time and that's our target market. At least, that is, when it comes to taxes. Because while the Gipper did deliver steep tax cuts in 1981 (slashing the top rate from 70% to 28%), what Reagan giveth he also taketh away. As Paul Krugman noted, in the face of the staggering deficits Reagan's supply-side tax cuts produced, "no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people":

The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.

Tax historian Joseph Thorndike concurred, noting that the two bills passed in 1982 and 1984 together "constituted the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime."

But the Reagan tax hikes hardly ended there.

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What a dope. "I've since been studying, and Chile has done this..." During the time of Reagan, Chile's Social Security system was considered to be the wingnut Holy Grail. I guess Sharon didn't get too far in her "studying" and whatnot, or she'd know why the saner people just don't talk about Chile in much detail (of course, there's always the optimists at the Cato Institute):

Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Sharron Angle says the nation's Social Security system needs to be privatized, and she says it was done before in Chile.CBS affiliate 8 News Now reports on what the Tea Party-backed hopeful had to say on the matter in an interview on Thursday:

...Angle's new ads say she's out to save Social Security by protecting it from government raids.
But in the primary, she said that Medicare and Social Security needed to be phased out in favor of something privatized, saying, that it can't be fixed. 8 News NOW asked how is that not a flip flop.

"It is when we have a $2.5 trillion raid and pillaging going on and an empty trust fund and now we are upside down. As of last Friday, they said, (there was a) $41 billion shortfall in Social Security. $41 billion less going in than coming out. It's broken," she said.

Angle then referred to 1980s Chile -- then under a military dictatorship -- to explain her previous statements that the United States should phase out its current system.

"When I said privatize, that's what I meant," explained the Senate contender. "That I thought we would just have to go to the private sector for a template on how this is supposed to be done. However, I've since been studying and Chile has done this."

However, the pension system established in 1981 by right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is no longer a fully private system. Chile's system was revamped in 2008 to expand public pensions for groups left out of its system, including low-income seniors.

There are lots of reasons why, in the real world, a privatized system doesn't work.

For the first ten years, while Chile had high inflation, their investment funds did well, since about half was invested in government bonds that were indexed to inflation. But once the economy cooled down, returns fell and they now pay little in return.

Investors also pay very high fees, which hit the low wage earners harder. (Oh, and by the way? The funds are widely thought to be corrupt cartels, protected by the government. Of course, that would never happen here!) And low wage earners were notorious under-reporters of income. Another problem: the system isn't set up for short-term contract work, which is now a common form of employment.

The funds don't pay out much, especially for low wage earners. (Unlike our Social Security system.) Notice the stories the wingnuts quote all point to "average" return -- but that's artificially high due to the period of high inflation.

And it didn't pay, anyway. Because of transition costs and other factors, the Chilean privatized system costs three times as much to run.

But the regime knew what they were doing: They excluded the military from the private plans, members of which continue to receive pensions under the old, more generous system.

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Glenn Beck had another one of those moments yesterday on his Fox News show, talking about the G20 Summit in Toronto:

BECK: Anyway, President Obama was there, and, um, he said something that kind of tripped my Marxism alarms. Here he is.

Mind you, Beck's "Marxism alarm" goes off all the time, with increasing shrillness and volume. It's kind of like the guy who sets his car alarm to such a sensitivity that it shrieks and squonks if you so much as walk within twenty feet of it.

Especially when you see what set it off this time:

Obama: A strong and durable recovery also requires countries not having an undue advantage. I think we all have the same interest -- and that is, the United States can compete with anybody -- as long as we've got an even playing field.

Somehow, to Beck, this sounded vaguely Marxist. But in fact, what Obama was saying was classic American capitalism. Because he was talking about the disadvantage at which currency restrictions force us to play:

"A strong and durable recovery also requires countries not having an undue advantage. So we also discussed the need for currencies that are market-driven," Obama said. "As I told President Hu yesterday, the United States welcomes China's decision to allow its currency to appreciate in response to market forces."

In fact, American presidents have advocated a "level playing field" within the world's markets for decades. Bush pushed it. So did Ronald Reagan.

What, does Beck think the USA should compete at a disadvantage? Or does this mean he thinks that free-market capitalism operates on an uneven playing field, and that capitalism and fair competition cannot coexist?

Because that, you know, is actually a classic Marxist position.

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The right is freaking out over President Obama's plans to cut back the inventory of nukes and the way they are used.

As usual, Rudy Giuliani is up in arms over it and goes ballistic -- as is his nature.

Sam Stein reminds Rudy that his own personal hero, Ronald Reagan, hated nuclear weapons just as much as we currently do.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been arguably the most frank and vocal critic of President Barack Obama's proposal to vastly limit and ultimately eliminate the potential use and supply of nuclear weapons. In an interview with The National Review on Tuesday, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate called Obama's vision "inept," a liberal fantasia.

"A nuclear-free world has been a 60-year dream of the Left," he said, "just like socialized health-care. This new policy, like Obama's government-run health program, is a big step in that direction."

If only things were so black and white. Of course, one of Giuliani's political heroes, Ronald Reagan, once said that nuclear weapons were "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization." Indeed, while he irked his detractors for years over a seemingly endless arms buildup, Reagan was, by his own telling, firmly committed to the abolition of nuclear weapons.

"[F]or the eight years I was president," he wrote in his memoirs, "I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind."

While I was researching our new book, I remembered the TV blockbuster movie that starred JoBeth Williams and which freaked out the entire country, including Ronald Reagan.

In 1983, there was a TV movie broadcast to the world entitled " The Day After," about the ramifications of a nuclear war that changed the way Americans viewed the nuclear bomb. It was the highest rated telecast (100 million views) in the history of television at the time and it changed the way Ronald Reagan perceived nuclear arms:

Reagan wrote in his diary that the film "left me greatly depressed," and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".[2] In 1987 during the era of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms, the film was shown on Soviet television. During the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty at Reykjavik, Meyer received a telegram from President Reagan that said, 'Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did.'[3]

Mushroom clouds covered our television screens in urban cities, but also suburban homes. Nobody escaped. Whether you lived in a mansion by the sea or a tenement in Brooklyn and the horror of that moment was etched into the minds of all Americans. All anybody talked about for days after the broadcast was what would happen if Russia and the US finally pushed the button and mutual destruction ensued.

The Day After influenced Reagan to the point that he told the directed how much it influenced him. Reagan lived in a time when the right-wing hawks like Newt Gingrich and Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist were spreading fearmongering lies to scare Americans into voting for Ronald. They even said that Soviet spies had infiltrated our government, so the paranoia around Russia was very, very high.

For someone like Reagan to realize the death and destruction nuclear weapons can cause should have taught people like Rudy a lesson, but everything that comes out from most of the right wing these days has no basis in reality. They speak only for the purpose of scoring cheap political points.

The amount of bombs that Russian and the US possess is insane. For Obama's many hawkish and shocking positions in the face of war, at least this one makes some sense.

GE now joins the Reagan History Rewrite project as a new contributor, blanketing the airwaves with this nonsense, celebrating Ronald Reagan's "Centennial" while pandering to the right wing with tales of his majesty and legend.

Angelo (aka StopBeck on Twitter) was kind enough to list some facts as an antidote for GE's spin:

Ronald Reagan destroyed unions...cut the budgets for education, EPA, poverty programs, etc...engaged in a public policy initiative aimed specifically at screwing over the poor...advanced the prison-industrial complex...hollowed out the Federal government to the best of his ability...ironically espoused the belief that government was the enemy (hello! he was the president *facepalm*)...was reckless and neglectful in responding to HIV/AIDS...tried to cut disabled people from social security rolls (that’s right...disabled people)...HUD grant fraud…Sewergate…

And let's not forget the greatest achievement of his Presidency: the Iran-Contra arms for hostages deal.

GE takes billions of dollars for defense contracts and other goodies from our government, and sees nothing wrong with singing Reagan's praises on Rush hate talk radio?

I'm waiting for their celebration of JFK to balance things. And a unicorn. And maybe a pony, too.

Ed.: Be sure to read the definitive discussion of the Reagan mythmaking machine -- and how it is a significant cog in the mighty conservative-movement Wurlitzer -- in Will Bunch's Tear Down This Myth: How The Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, an important read for every progressive.

Ronald Reagan famously gave the 11th Commandment of GOP politics: Thou shalt not speak ill of your fellow Republican.

Apparently, some 30 years after he left office and six years after he passed away, David Frum didn't think it members of the GOP needed to still worship at the altar of St. Ronnie.

He was wrong:

David Frum, who wrote a widely-circulated blog post Sunday suggesting passage of the health care bill amounted to "Waterloo" for the Republican Party, has apparently been forced out of his fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Frum posted a resignation letter on his blog following a conversation with AEI President Arthur Brooks announcing that his position is "terminated."[..]

On Tuesday, the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page hammered Frum for his "argument that if only Republicans had negotiated with Democrats, they could have somehow made the bill less awful than it is."

"Mr. Frum now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a stock Beltway role. But he's peddling bad revisionist history that would have been even worse politics," wrote the newspaper.

While I shed no tears for someone who has been smack dab in the middle of some of the most devastating policies ever wreaked on the whole world, it does strike me as more of the same recklessness and frenzied emotion that we see with the tea baggers, but coming from the institutional conservatives of DC. The fact that they cannot bear criticism or self-examination and would rather bash and remove the person who counsels reflection and restraint makes me a little frightened of who is in charge. Could it be that AEI is actually taking orders from the tea baggers?

The NY Times broke this story today :

"Judge Alito's confirmation is also the culmination of a disciplined campaign begun by the Reagan administration to seed the lower federal judiciary with like-minded jurists who could reorient the federal courts toward a view of the Constitution much closer to its 18th-century authors' intent, including a much less expansive view of its application to individual rights and federal power...read on

Ted Kennedy let his thoughts be known about the use of the 'Swift Boat' PR Firm

Download | play -WMP

Good gravy...they've got an airport, a highway, the largest federal building in Washington DC and a freeway and that's still not enough honor for those Gipper-worshiping acolytes:

(S)ome of the late president's admirers are launching a new effort to add another honor: printing his likeness on a $50 bill in place of Ulysses S. Grant's.

In polls of presidential scholars, Reagan consistently outranks Grant, said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), who introduced legislation to make the change.

But at least one Democrat who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, where the proposal has been sent, isn't ready to jettison Grant for "someone whose policies are still controversial."

"Our currency ought to be something that unites us," said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks).

They never stop finding ways to keep throwing Reagan up as some weird conservative messiah (never mind that they sneer at Obama for being messianic). In fact, there is a peak near me called Mt. Diablo. A man--who professed to object to the obvious satanic overtones of the name--has been trying to get the county to rename it Mt. Reagan. Thankfully, the county has so far been unpersuaded.

I've never really gotten the rosy-eyed nostalgia for Reagan. I came of age during Reagan's presidency, and I don't remember things being all that great for most Americans. I do remember being concerned about the cognitive powers of the president when he played dumb for reporters during the Iran Contra scandal, a fear that was--in retrospect--not entirely unfounded. I remember thousands of developmentally disabled individuals dumped on the streets of California, when Governor Reagan turned the mental hospitals over to the Correctional Department, leaving families at a loss as to how to care for them, and the number of homeless in California shot up. I remember watching friends get sick and die of a new and mysterious disease that Reagan wouldn't even acknowledge by name. I know there's a lot of mysticism surrounding "It's Morning In America" meme, but does that really make all these numbnuts forget the massive deficit spending they clutch their pearls over now? Do they forget Iran-Contra when waxing rhapsodic over the end of the Cold War?

Sorry, Grant has his detractors, but I'd much rather keep him on the $50 than give Reagan this particular honor.

The Nation has more on the truth of Reagan's legacy. If you're a Facebook denizen, you may want to join the group "JUST SAY NO" TO RONALD REAGAN ON A $50 BILL OR ANY CURRENCY - EVER!